


A Phantom Christmas Carol

by ReconstructWriter



Category: Danny Phantom
Genre: Alternate Universe - A Christmas Carol Fusion, And I Make it Worse, Depictions of Post Apocalyptic Future, Depictions of Vivisection, Evil Science, Graphic depictions of violence - Freeform, Inspired by A Christmas Carol, Like Dissection but Alive, So its Got a Halloweeney Vibe, Stubborn Fentons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-04
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 05:47:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21670963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ReconstructWriter/pseuds/ReconstructWriter
Summary: Captured and imprisoned by his parents on Christmas Eve, Danny Phantom has one hope of escaping dissection. Three infamous spirits and a certain half-dead partner must convince the Fentons to change their ghost-hating ways, otherwise Jack and Maddie will make the worst mistake of their lives.
Comments: 68
Kudos: 153





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Personally I would have loved to have seen a Danny Phantom-style Christmas Carol instead of the Christmas episode that was aired but this would have been awful dark to air right after the Ultimate Enemy. Happy Holidays and enjoy my take on Dickens tale ;)

The Partner

Fluffy snowflakes floated gently to the ground, alighting on glittering faux fur coats wrapped around cold-resistant blue and orange hazmat and decorating shopping bags bloated with Christmas gifts, sparkling red, green and white wrapping paper and giant bows in silver and gold. Flakes carefully settled on cheerful Santa hats, touched cheeks red with cold and bright smiles.

At their feet, snowflakes drowned in green blood.

Danny Phantom fought gravity, but every time he lifted his body an inch, the earth's force multiplied tenfold, as though he drowned at the bottom of the ocean. Every harsh breath burned like a thousand hot coals. Up his head came, slow as the downed fox bitten and clawed by hounds to stare at their master's gun. Ectoplasm melted the snow all around him, pooled beneath him, soaked his suit and the alleyway as it dried, clotting his wounds until a single twitch split them open again with a fresh burst of pain. Muscles trembled with exertion as though he'd run two marathons; the ghost hero tried to pull his arms beneath his body and prop himself up. Any position was better than lying prone before ghost hunters. Torn muscles screamed like tortured prisoners from the weight of his body. Gnashing teeth, unwilling to give in the ghostly superhero pressed further as though climbing a rope parted to a thread.

That thread of strength snapped. Eyes flew wide like his heart had given out, agony redoubled like an extra weight flung upon a bowed back, sending him crashing into the snow once more. His chest strained for every burning breath, feeble puffs of air passed broken ribs and scattered snowflakes onto two pairs of snow-boots that had stopped mere inches from his face.

Phantom lay like a stag at the end of a bloody trail that could go no further, nor put up any fight. The very last vestiges of his strength had been expended dragging his battered, beaten body through a fortuitous portal back to the human world.

"Typical luck," he muttered. He had crawled with every inch of speed his tortured, broken body could muster only to find himself crumpled at the feet of the infamous Fenton doctors. They blotted out the cheery Christmas decorations of shops with their bulk.

"Jack," whispered Maddie, her eyes never leaving weary green ones as Danny struggled to get his arms beneath him.

"I've got an emergency ecto-net in the GAV," Jack said breathlessly.

"Good, then go get it. Hurry."

Unable to crouch, unable to crawl, Danny mustered the last fragments of his power to escape—intangibility, flight, anything was better than staying. With his gristly fate looming like the specter of Christmas future, Danny cared nothing for his pride, but before he could so much as twitch a finger his own mother pounced upon him. With feline swiftness her hands closed around his right arm and wrenched any looseness from the limb and a scream from his lips.

Phantom gasped again, air rushing into his lungs like broken glass as Maddie's hold tightened, broken bone twisting and scraping on other broken bones like raw nerves against concrete. Beneath her hands his muscles went rigid with protest. Escape was futile. The lock not only immobilized the powerless limb but further twisted torn ligaments while her fingers pressed deeper into the wounds wrapped around his wrist. Pain stabbed him through burned skin and Danny trembled from the force of the agony, clenching his teeth around a scream. Intangibility, normally effortless, was far beyond his reach now, on the other side of the ocean of agony engulfing him.

"You're not getting away this time ghost." Her grip tightened.

Pain slammed him in the gut, ripping air from his lungs. Danny tried to twist his body to relieve the tension within torn tissues but the first roll of muscle gave him away to his mother. Wrapping one arm around his right to secure it, she grabbed hold of his left arm and yanked it from beneath him. Again Danny collapsed in the snow, chest pressing into gravel beneath gray slush. White-hot agony slammed into his back like a guillotine as a hundred and thirty pounds of muscle centered on less than four square inches of knee forced him further to the ground. The superhero felt his legs go numb, as though they couldn't stand to feel the pain anymore.

Was his back broken?

Crawling through the pain like he'd desperately crawled through the ghost zone, Danny focused only on intangibility. It streamed slowly through him, like his rings the first time he'd transformed and his body turned more to mist than true intangibility. A hundred and thirty concentrated pounds of force sank a fraction of an inch deeper. Bony knee hit bony spine.

Despite his torn throat, broken ribs and acidic air in his lungs, a scream ripped from his lungs like a gunshot, so loud, so sudden his mother flinched from the sheer sound. Danny's voice was high and rough and harsh like a dying animal; he thrashed like a fish speared straight through as misty muscles snapped solid again. The rawness of his throat, like his windpipe had been scraped clean of flesh with a razor, was mere background pain to the unceasing drum of agony in his back. His senses drowned in pain.

"Got the net!" Jack bellowed.

"Good, he's trying to escape," said Maddie.

With both arms twisted behind his back in his mother's iron-sure grip, his whole upper body pinned beneath her ax of a knee, Danny couldn't do more than kick if he wasn't torn to hell and back. The weak twitches did nothing against the steel-strong, flexible strands of anti-ecto energy Jack flung onto him. Freezing the net did nothing, not with his powers so drained. He doubted either ghost hunter realized his latest escape attempt.

Maddie coiled strands of net around his limbs, hopelessly entangling them in a thousand nooses and cutting off flight as she bound first his left arm, then his right. Without the need to pin him to the ground she was able to rise and bind his twitching legs just as harshly. Danny's lungs filled with air like acid, shaving off the dizziness clouding his eyes.

"Don't." The word was a whisper against a northern gale, issuing from bloody, cracked lips, followed by a wet cough. That soft plea only encouraged his parents. Coils of ghost-trapping fibers resistant to liquid nitrogen temperatures ensnared his throat, choking further words. Once they backed off Danny Phantom was wrapped up just like another Christmas present.

"We went out Christmas shopping and got the best present of our lives." Jack's squeal belonged on a little kid on Christmas. Danny had never heard his father so excited.

"Yes, lets hurry up and get home so we can unwrap him," Maddie gave him a peck on the cheek before hoisting the ghost hero's shoulders off the ground. Jack grabbed his legs and the pair heaved him up with more difficulty than they would have needed in previous years.

"He's heavier than I remember," Jack commented. "I could've sworn he was only half my size."

His stomach wrenched all its bile away. He gagged without release, as though his vomit had spread to the rest of his guts. Danny floated in a haze of wanting desperately to scream in agony and vomit in agony and unable to do either, which was more painful still.

"How fascinating, we need to compare with our files back home but I think the facial features have aged like a living teenager." Danny's heart froze, but his mother only gave the sort of laugh that comes from hearing something preposterous expressed.

Holiday crowds should have choked their progress to the GAV but Jack had driven the whole vehicle over rather than just retrieved the net. And when Jack drove, everyone fled. In only a few short steps Danny hung in front of it. The Fenton Specter Container sprang open and the two paranormal scientists pushed him, net and all, inside the Fenton invention.

Danny was thoroughly trapped. His injuries made focusing on his dwindling powers like climbing a mountain after hiking ten miles to get there. Intangibility didn't even phase him. The net's coils didn't loosen in the slightest. These feeble shreds of effort ate at his sight, darkening his surroundings as exhaustion pulled him under like the ocean against a castaway.

The world brightened as his face smashed against the glass-like containment unit. The car twisted as though balanced on two wheels. Anything not nailed or glued down pitched sideways as the world turned inside out. Jack had pulled a u-turn. The GAV straightened out and Danny was flung back to the other side, the laws of physics taking vengeance against his skull. This did not mercifully make him blacken out. Merciful blackouts, in his experience, were too rare and too short. Turning his head slightly to ease this new migraine, Danny's eyes met the glowing green stare of an ecto-gun. Despite the driving that would ensure them back at the house within five minutes regardless of traffic, Maddie's aim with the weapon never wavered. Like a professional bull-rider her lower body moved with every crazy whip-lash Jack executed at the helm of the wheel while her upper body was poised motionless as a hawk's head.

Staring beyond the merciless eye of the ghost weapon and into the reddened, insect-like goggles that hid his mother's eyes, Danny attempted to sway her with what little breath he had regained.

"You can't…let me…go?" he rasped in a voice that sounded like torture even to his own ears. "In…Christmas s-spirit?"

"No," said Maddie harshly.

"Why does Christmas matter to a filthy ghost?" Jack asked, honest bewilderment coloring his boisterous attitude as traffic dodged him.

"Christmas…matters," Danny whispered softly, but with powerful conviction. After Ghost Writer…after he had so thoroughly ruined Christmas, his friends had taught him that.

"Only to the living, now ghost unless you have something useful to say, stay silent, we don't want to wake Danny up," Maddie ordered.

Hysterical laughter bubbled up in his throat. Oh the irony. "I…hah, ohh…don't think…he…you need *snicker* to…worry." Oh, laughing was so not the best medicine. Splatters of ectoplasm stung his tongue. His laughter trailed off to a wet-bubbly hiss as his ribs staged a revolt against the rest of his body.

"Danno doesn't get enough sleep anyway so shut it," Jack added.

Danny had one more chance to escape. Every breath he took was to bolster himself as much as possible. This time he practically wrung his ghost core of all the power he could. He didn't move, didn't dare give his mother a twitch of a hint of his thoughts. Click went the containment unit. His father grabbed the net first.

Now!

Danny slipped through the coils like water between fingers. Coils tightened around a wrist, snagging him like a hook on a fish. Yanking his wrist, it pulled free with a sickening crack and got to his feet.

Like a leopard Maddie Fenton pounced again on him, one hand gripping his broken wrist. Another flash of blinding pain froze him. Another bungle of coils as the insidious net—how he hated nets—was flung over him, its coils strangling his movements. If he hadn't been in so much pain Phantom would have been embarrassed at how easily Jack and Maddie caught him and hauled him away.

Adrenaline slipped away. Once more the core of agony beat in his chest, pulsed in his limbs down to his fingers. Phantom could feel every wound as though every nerve was focused only on their emanating pain. They hauled him none-too-gently in the house. The door swung closed, edge digging into a gash on his shoulder. His leg hit the corner of the hall, jostling a torn tendon. His damaged wrist smacked against the doorknob to the lab. Down the stairs they carried him but occasionally a food or ankle would hit the stairs, jolting his aching body.

They let him drop on one of the many cold, metallic dissection tables. Danny let out a scream as every wound, torn tendon and broken bone got a re-run. Panting harshly, every breath spattering more ectoplasm on his lips, he tried to manage the pain as it rolled over him in waves. Each wave united, gathering their strength, crashed over him and never pulled back. These he bore with struggling breaths through gritted teeth, with cries strangled in a raspy throat that could not do his pain justice. He wanted to curl in a ball, reach into himself and tear out that pulsing heart of pain. The gaping wound it would leave would be a relief.

"…make sure he doesn't get away this time," he heard of his mom's voice.

Cold metal hit his tongue, thrust through his jaws to scrape the back of his throat. Danny gagged as the device wrenched his jaws apart. His garbled plea was muffled before he could even voice it as a rubber and steel contraption was forced in and around his mouth. A gag. A thought struck him. True terror flooded his nerves, excited his tendons and muscles and pushed away the pain from his conscious thought. If he did not reveal his secret now he might not get the chance to…at least, not until after. Danny Phantom reached within the core of himself, for the warm pulse of life that was centered within and protected by his ghostly form before his parents could make the most irreparable mistake of their lives.

Cuffs snapped around his wrists like jaws, another set seized his ankles and the grasp he had upon that beat of life loosened. Phantom's breath condensed to liquid in his lungs. Had he forever lost his human half, his connection to life?

No, no of course not, common sense said. Cuffs could not kill him, but they could muffle his powers as the gag muffled his voice. After all the time and effort he had spent to conceal his secret was the entire universe now so against its exposure? Only an incomprehensible muffled confession escaped the gag. The bitter rubber flavor was overwhelmed with the noxious acidic taste from a hundred bleeding captives. Phantom tried to spit the accursed thing out but it didn't move. Bile crawled up his throat instead and he had to relax his jaws and breathe shallowly. His vision was enveloped by teal before black blotted it out. Chilly hazmat fabric clung all around his eyes and upper half of his face. A startlingly loud click pierced his ears as a metallic clasp pinched a throbbing knot at the back of his head. With vision vanished and speech strangled he had only his ears and nose to inform him about the familiar lab and his parents. Through the filter of two senses these household things became alien and horrific as all ghosts knew his parents' lab.

The acidic stench of ectoplasm clogged his nose and reached into his brain, ghosting over primal terror. The smell was inescapable, on the gag, on his parent's hazmat suits, flowing from his wounds, in beakers and jars and needles. The blood of ghosts. Fresh and old, burnt and liquid and solid on the floor. To his ghostly instincts the lab was as horrific as any torture chamber, so consumed with the stench of ghost blood his nose could scent nothing else.

But he could hear.

"Definitely not getting away again. Do you have that new invention set up?"

"In a minute." That would be his dad. "Just a few more calibrations. Isn't this exciting! I've always wanted to rip a ghost apart molecule by molecule and this baby should let us do it. And it couldn't have happened to a better ghost."

"Yes dear, eventually but first the samples. We should keep him intact as long as possible."

Which option was least horrific? His father's or his mother's. Danny's best efforts only pained him more. Strength oozed out of him with his blood. His wounds were crusting over, but too slowly and the world tilted oddly. Collapsing against the table, his head lolled toward the cuffs, the blindfold and gag digging into the sides of his face. No eyes were needed for him to know the cuffs were even stronger than the slender cables of the net. As the dizziness subsided he lifted one arm, attempting to reach beyond the table the cuff clasped him to. Nothing, not the slightest squeak to hint his strength was even close to overcoming the cuffs.

"Try breaking those cuffs again and I will shoot you," said Maddie, voice harsher than the ecto-gun's whine. "I don't need you completely intact to understand your anatomy."

A wince escaped Danny, though not from imagined pain. The mere thought that his parents would, in their ignorance, harm their own son kept him still. When or if he ever revealed his secret—and he really should, like now—they would never forgive themselves for any harm to him. So out of fourteen years of pure love for them, he remained still. Another bout of dizziness overcame him and he closed his eyes. Why was it taking so long for his wounds to close?

Would everything be better if they didn't, if he simply faded away before his parents could actually do anything? Better than having them forever carry the price of his secrecy.

"I can't believe we let this get so cluttered." He could hear his mother's footsteps, unsteady and careful in the manner of someone picking their steps amid ruins.

"Well we weren't expecting to capture Phantom on this night of all nights. Where's the ecto-infiltrator? Need to test that out."

"You have the ghost security engaged?"

"Of course!"

Finger pads pressed along the sides of his wrists on the boundaries of the cuffs. Nails pricked like teeth against the thin barrier of hazmat suit. Had Danny lost a little more blood, been a little dizzier, he could believe nothing was different. Her hands could be checking his wounds, her touch could be soothing, her soft motherly murmurs relaxing.

"There. Don't want you escaping like every other time ghost." A harsh, bond-testing tug.

…Almost.

"Found it!" Jack bellowed. "Now let's fire this baby up."

His excitable father fell silent. Clicking buttons and the occasional shift of weight alone kept the lab from peace. The oppressive quiet lingered and loomed like another shade of pain. Simultaneous gasps penetrated Danny's foggy hearing just before his mother's voice continued. "Honey…how is this possible?"

"I don't know, but it practically upends twenty years of research and theories and conclusions," said his father. "Maybe he's a new breed of ghost or something!" said Jack. "Imagine the possibilities! The discoveries!"

"And this is why we need to preserve him."

Danny fought against the cuffs, straining to reach something—anything other than laying helplessly. Every contortion felt like bone scraping against bone. The minute movements peeled open wounds glued with blood, freeing a fresh supply of ectoplasm. Spots of color dotted his darkened sight. Danny took several deep, steady breaths through nose and gag, desperately clinging to consciousness.

Maddie Fenton knew how to imprison better than any enemy and hadn't missed any means of escape. Even his neck was bound to the table, what little movement the manacles allowed was only good for tearing open his wounds. Danny struggled with everything he had left. He couldn't resign himself to his worst nightmares, to this reality. No—he had to escape.

One more reason Christmas was such a horrible holiday for him.

"…the best holiday present ever!" Jack crowed.

"Present?" Maddie stopped. "Jack, the presents. Oh damn it's almost Christmas," said Maddie.

"Not to worry, we're talking about Danny up at the crack of noon Fenton," said Jack. "Plenty of time to get some molecule ripping done."

"But Jazz is home from college and she's always been an early riser," said Maddie. "I don't like it any more than you do but family…family does come first. Always."

"You're right Maddie pie," said Jack, "Besides, between the two of us Phantom's not going anywhere. Let me start up the Fenton security system and then we'll go and wrap those presents!"

"We should cage him just in case," Maddie added. "We won't have to wait long. You know how attached Danny is to his friends," said Maddie. "He might want to go visit them with Jazz and then we'll have the house to ourselves."

"That's the spirit!" added Jack, "Or we could get the kids to bed early," his voice dropped to a suggestive tone Danny could have gladly spent his entire life without hearing, "And have the whole night of studying to ourselves."

Blood loss and pain took its toll. When the cuffs snapped open Danny could barely manage a half-hearted jerk toward the illusion of freedom. A pair of hands hauled him over a beefy shoulder like a sack of flour, bringing enough pain for bile to pierce his tongue and colors blasted sightless eyes. His remaining senses drowned in pain. When at last the torturous jerking and twisting of his limbs stopped, a solid metal column stood between his body and the cuffs, his arms curled around it. From memory alone he knew that solid bar of metal was buried in both floor and ceiling. Even if he managed to rip it out—a feat he couldn't manage at less than full strength—the whole lab would collapse upon his freedom.

A door whined shut. Their retreating footsteps were muffled on the metallic floor and his father spoke with a muted voice.

"Just a moment, ah here we go. Now don't you move ghost because this whole system is now targeted for your unique ectoplasmic signature. Even think about stepping or phasing a limb out of that cage and you'll be Swiss cheese. "

"Just to make certain," Maddie checked off precautions: "Gag, blindfold, hands and feet cuffed, collared, chained to the floor, caged and Fenton security system on. Yes, he can't possibly escape. But wait; let me put the security camera on auto-alert, just to be safe. He's a slippery one."

"Well he's not slipping away this time."

Their confidence was not without reason. In full command of his powers, Danny could have phased his arms into tentacle-like limbs to free them and slipped the ankle cuffs with his ghostly tail. Though his father had excitedly babbled of the Fenton Ecto-Container's intangibility imperviousness and ecto-blast invulnerability—the material of the walls and ceiling would burn any spirit—Danny was certain his ghostly wail could blast through.

Beyond the cage, should he escape such an impenetrable barrier, lay the Fenton security system, no ghost land, which had nearly taken his head the last time he had been fool enough to venture to the lab without turning it off. Weakened from escaping the cage, he would have found it a daunting challenge.

But he hadn't command of any of his powers. Wounded, steadily losing more blood, tired and dizzy, blinded and gagged, without the ghostly energy to turn his pinky invisible, he hadn't a prayer. Yet he had to try. He couldn't let his mom and dad do this. For their sakes, he had to escape.

"Just a few hours, we can even slip out and check on him every hour or so just to make certain those bonds are tight," said Maddie as they left the lab.

"This will be the best Christmas ever!" added Jack confidently.

The door slammed shut, leaving agonizing silence in its wake. The new Fenton ghost cage easily filtered out the familiar electrical hum of the lab. Danny attempted once more to contort his body out of its bonds, but they held fast. A fresh wave of starry spots greeted him before darkness. By the time the blackness of unconsciousness receded to the blackness of blindness minutes or hours might have passed. No chill of fresh ectoplasm bit his skin. Mere struggle was not enough; his thumbs would heal quickly again. All he needed was a simple, clean break. Nothing new.

Bracing himself for more pain and turning his thumbs at just the right angle, Danny thought: this is the worst Christmas ever.

Then he jerked violently, smashing fragile bones onto cuffs with the whole of his body weight.

At least the gag muffled his scream.

Fentonworks was festooned with decorations: wrapping paper, ribbon, bows and cards. Green Ghost-shaped Christmas lights, Fenton preceding their name, coiled around the Christmas tree, the staircase, bordered the doorways and hung in a misshapen lump off the roof to light those last few hours of night. Amid all this was the couch, buried beneath the trappings of Christmas surrounding Maddie and Jack.

"Oh, I found the name tags." Jack pulled a crumpled paper of holiday stickers out from beneath his bottom, which was now marked 'to honey, with love, hubby.'

"Thank you dear," said Maddie, "Now this one is for Danny." She handed him one of the new DOOMED games, snatching a psychology book away just in time. While Jazz was resigned to the occasional present mix-up and would spout little more than a minor psychoanalyzing lecture, Danny took it more personally. His shoulders would slump a little more and he was usually so gloomy around the holidays anyway, they didn't need to add to it. Especially not after their annual argument almost ruining Christmas for everyone.

Well, and that no-good ghost.

For this one day she could keep her mouth shut about every scrap of scientific evidence proving Santa's impossibility. Provided her husband kept his ridiculous ideas to himself.

"Oh right, almost forgot myself," said Jack and began wrapping the present. "Sure hope this helps. Danno's been a little down in the dumps lately."

"Yes he has," Maddie trailed off, trying to remember a time when her son hadn't been down in the dumps. Teenage years made new people out of beloved children but Danny—sometimes he just looked so tired. A disturbing sort of tired too, no mere lack of sleep from movie or game marathons.

"This actually looks kinda interesting." Jack broke her musings. "A pity it's all zombies, zombies, zombies. Imagine a ghost game."

"Not a bad idea," Maddie commented, "But no game could possibly compare to the real thing."

"True, true. Would be nice to get Danno into the family business though. Then we could all go ghost hunting! A perfect family get-together."

"There's still a chance dear," said Maddie, curling the last ribbon on Jazz's present with a swipe of scissors. "Look at Jazz. Two years ago ghosts didn't exist in her mind; now she's blazing a trail into para-psychology."

"Right you are, though I don't see the interest in ghost minds. Always obsessing over one thing and not a thought to anything else."

"Like you."

To experienced ghost hunters the oddly-echoing voice was no more frightening than an old friend's, if not nearly as welcome. The pair whipped around as one, drawing ecto-guns—Jack fumbling, Maddie smoothly—to face this new threat.

The glowing, floating form was impossible. Even in a world where ghosts were accepted to exist this was wrong. Jack's heart suffered the blow of a bullet, sharp and numb and white-hot agony all at once. His brain locked only on impossibility.

Maddie's brain broke but her heart remained intact. In a trice she was between the ghost and Jack. That was when the lack of alarm hit her.

They had painstakingly designed, built, re-designed, modified and repaired the Fenton security system to automatically alert them if a ghost so much as set an intangible toe in their house—without going off around their son, of all the strange things. For a ghost to break into Fentonworks wasn't impossible; it happened surprisingly often. To do so silently was.

Yet Jack and Maddie had heard an echoing voice and their security system stayed silent.

This couldn't be.

Ghosts were literally Maddie and Jack's bread and butter. Their familiarity with the paranormal was such that even the godly form of Pariah Dark or the inhuman displays of power from Phantom elicited little more than a bat of an eyelash. Missing heads, malevolent shadows with glowing red eyes, corpse-blue skin or slimy tentacles could not faze them anymore. Ectoplasmic entities had lost the ability to cause a shiver of horror through the spine of either husband or wife.

Until now.

For Jack, to look at the specter was to do so through the eyes of a terrified child, before he'd understood what he was staring at, but knew instinctively was wrong. Merely glancing at it brought ancient fear to the surface. The monster shouldn't exist, especially not here. Surrounded by the glitter and life and trappings of Christmas was death. It didn't belong. This thought produced the instinctive trigger-finger reaction in Jack and a bolt of ectoplasm shot out of his bazooka.

It missed, blowing a hole in the center of a Christmas wreath hanging from their closet door.

Similar emotions coursed through Maddie's body, dragging her back to a silly young teenager whose well-honed martial skills could do nothing against ghosts. The intangible claws no block could deflect, the unnaturally glowing eyes no strike could close had elicited a helpless sort of fear Maddie absolutely hated. Deep in her, alongside fury and fear and drive to never be so defenseless again, was the urge to rip away the veil of ignorance and panic with cold, hard scientific fact.

This ghost brought youthful horror forth once more as no undead creature they had seen before, completely lifeless in a way even the blobs or black shadowy ghosts could never be. Phantom, for all his power, had convinced most people he was practically human for good reason. Lively was an excellent description of him. Trapped and wounded in their lab, he clung to the facade of life as all ectoplasmic slime did.

This ghost looked dead. Not dead as a door-nail, but dead as a coffin nail.

All color had been leached out of the spirit like an old picture left to the weather's ruthlessness, shrouding the ghoul in grays. Its glow was dead. The ghoul's aura devoured the cheery Christmas tree glow, the amusing ghostly decorations, the lamp-light and even the luminous Fentonworks light though the door-windows. This spirit leeched away light like a black hole. The creature's infectious grays dimmed the vibrancy of their room's festive colors. Air grew colder and stale; the couple breathed deep of the grave. To describe this ghost's phantom as death no one bothered to warm over would give the undead too much life. Neither ghost hunter could believe such a monster could have ever had a semblance of being.

Its hazmat suit was like theirs: thick, flexible and tight. But this trapping of life was painted over with tones of death. Rot sunk into the fabric, eating away at the torn and frayed material and into the weakest points like a pestilence. Decay of fabric exposed decay of flesh. Old wounds gaped; a ghostly maggot crawled through folds of diseased ectoplasmic flesh. All the bugs imprisoned within the ghost were as dead as the one feeding them.

Death was its being, making home in its rotted heart. Other ghosts might have cores of ice or fire or even plants and emitted cold or heat or make nearby flowers bloom but not this ghost. Within that immobile chest, next to the deathly still heart loomed a core of death, pulsing forth putrid energy that rotted dead flesh, rusted knives of iron and silver, sullied containers of salt and crumpled blood blossoms to ashes. Even those ancient ghost hunting tools took on the pallor of death; they too were ghosts and in death caused the monster terrible agony.

Rusted, ancient, gnarled, lifeless chains coiled around its chest so tightly all missing breath was wrenched away. Leaden links sunk into softened flesh and brittle bones. Great, heavy manacles bowed once-proud shoulders; they sloped down like ancient mountains worn by endless eons of time. Massive loops of iron bit into bared arteries and veins as they strangled its neck before falling to the floor in a great robe of such heft that each step quaked. Each movement from the ghost brought forth an odd, shuddering sound of hundreds of iron cuffs clanking like the toll of a thousand deaths. Yet the ghost's entrance was silent, its movements not enough to rattle the deathly soundless aura permeating Fentonworks.

But all these horrors were mere window-dressing, relieving compared to the face neither chains nor instruments of torture dared touch. That deathly face was left excruciatingly intact, ravaged only by the monster's deathly core permeating every cell of fetid ectoplasm. Stringy strands of hair latched onto a skull as desperate as blades of grass clinging to life in the godforsaken desert. Lines carved by age—more age than mere life could justify—crisscrossed those sharp features like the scars of some ancient, battle-hardened warrior. Death had been brutal to the long face, battering it so many times the whole structure was misshapen as the twisted wreck of a car cruelly crashed. A pit gaped where once an eye had lingered, the skin peeled away to bare the boney socket. The other eye, still intact and all the more horrible for its wholeness, neither Maddie nor Jack could bear to stare at.

That eye was death itself, the lifeless core deep within the cavity where once a heart might have resided gaped within it. Out of that eye poured hollow despair so deep, so powerful that death only prolonged and worsened it. The eye trapped pitiless abyss. Jack and Maddie turned away, unable to stand such a gaze. Nor was the alien sight of death emanating from that intact organ enough to cow them, rather it was the unfathomable, unmentionable kinship present in the specter's deathly gaze that averted their stare.

So warped and twisted and rotted and faded the face was nigh unrecognizable, but worse still for its familiarity. One by one these slivers of identification condensed within Jack and Maddie's minds to an identity of one they had known well. But no, their minds balked at the idea, cringing away with great tremors of fear at the mere thought that this horrific, lifeless ghoul could have once been who they thought it was. Yet lips turned traitor, giving voice to the idea.

"Vlad?" Maddie whispered in the deathly silence.

Adding to their horror, the monstrous visage nodded in confirmation of its former name before speaking in a voice as torturous to the ears as the features were to the eyes. Death hadn't held back ghastly torture from that tone. Its voice was hoarse from the final shriek of death, harsh from the rot of time and torment, dry from death. Sandpaper dragged across a chalkboard would have been more melodious.

"I will be brief, as your hatred of ghosts surpassed mine in life."

"This can't be you!" Jack shouted, his face struck with the same horrific realization Maddie had come to only moments earlier. As open as his mind was, he could not see this death-cored, beaten monstrous ghost of a ghost as the same man he had seen so alive, so vibrant, so ready to take on the world.

"This is my fate." His leaden-against-concrete voice echoed. Gesturing to his chains he added: "In life I wove these chains with my acts of hatred and prejudice towards beings I refused to accept as my fellows."

"What hatred?" asked Jack, honestly shocked. "Vladdie loves people enough to risk himself against ghosts for strangers. Maybe he doesn't like to show it but he has a heart. I haven't met a less hateful person, except my dear Maddie."

The ghost ignored his words. "I was sent here with a warning: you wear such chains yourselves! And if this continues your fate will be far more terrible than my own."

"We have no chains and anything a ghost throws on us will be shot," Maddie said. Her gun had slackened slightly but at those words she brought it firmly to this false-Vlad's head.

The specter shook his head regretfully, "I foraged these chains without spirit to aid me, as do you. My wounds, my chains, my eternity as the very thing I had so passionately and bitterly hated… those are my punishments but far worse awaits you upon your deaths!"

"Bah! We're not coming back as filthy spooks," said Jack, grinning brightly. "No Fenton has ever become a ghost."

Dry, crackled, rotted lips twisted in some nauseating impersonation of amusement, as though the monster caught a terribly ironic lie in Jack's words, but a moment more it too died. "I have also been sent to tell you of three spirits come forth to haunt you."

"Drop the Dickens act," Maddie ordered. "There must be many actual Scrooges who could benefit from this spiel, rather than people who know the importance of Christmas. We even put off the opportunity of a lifetime in honor of this special day."

"And that alone has saved you from becoming completely irredeemable…and worse. Listen to the message of the three; for you have time. Three more come. Heed them."

"Well then they'll meet the Fenton best!" Jack hefted his bazooka with satisfaction, "There's plenty more where this came from so you can tell those ghosts to send their worst."

"They will send their best and I beg you to heed their words as I did not." Its voice dropped, as though the act of speaking wore away at whatever vitality the spirit possessed. "If not…for yourselves then listen…for the sake of your son."

A pair of glowing green weapons, like two burning, vengeful eyes glared at Vlad's spirit, pinning him to the floor beneath two protective parents. Jack, normally so boisterous and light-hearted, reminded people of a teddy bear. Now all joy and jolliness drained from him, leaving features stern as granite. He did not snarl, nor narrow his eyes but his featureless expression was far more terrible for it. Any observer was immediately reminded of the sheer amount of strength packed in massive, tense muscles over a frame better suited to a giant than a man and how devastating such strength would be unleashed in fury.

Maddie's features hardened cold and grim as the finest steel, forged so pure that fire or frost no longer had power to warp or bow it. She held her gun with the steady ease of one for whom using such a weapon was as inconsequential and everyday as using a fork. Her smaller frame hadn't the volcanic threat of her husband's massive form but her martial stance and steady, tactical gaze spoke of still greater danger. The peril of a cold, remote glacier, the greatest of its terrible power hidden beneath deceptively calm sea.

Vlad's expression did not change an iota. He looked neither fearful, nor grateful at this terrifying threat of imminent destruction, as though the Fentons were no more a threat than mice.

"No one harms Danny!" Jack boomed.

"Tell us where he is and we'll rip you to pieces!" Maddie spat.

In the same calm, creepy voice Vlad reiterated, "Learn from the spirits. They will reveal what you desperately need to know in order to prevent your terrible fate. And your son's." The spirit faded away as an echo after utterance.

Maddie's trigger finger twitched, but finely honed self-control kept her from blasting the floor where the ghost had been. Should still be. One of the many upgrades the Fenton couple had made over the years was to make the walls, floor and ceiling invulnerable to intangibility, even if the security system was off and smashed to pieces. No ghost could have simply left Fentonworks.

"Danny! We need to check on him!" said Jack.

"And keep an eye out for other ghosts. That thing said there were three others and we need to find them before they find him," Maddie added ominously.

The couple slipped upstairs to Danny's room, dread quietly condensing to lead within the pits of their hearts. Many an ectoplasmic monster had threatened them with dire tortures but none considered going after family. Ghosts—in their experience—simply didn't understand empathy enough to threaten loved ones.

In that, it appeared, they were wrong.

"No sign of any spectral scumbags," Jack whispered as they stalked up the stairs.

"If that…spirit is following the Christmas Carol they won't appear all at once and not for another hour," Maddie whispered. "But if we're Scrooge…he didn't have children. Danny would never fit into any role of the story."

She paused, the leaden lump in her heart dropping to her stomach, "Unless…Tiny Tim."

"No," Jack whispered desperately, mind scrambling for a less horrific conclusion. "That would make us…the Cratchits. Vlad was…Vlad was…but we just saw him alive and that ghost was definitely not newly dead."

"A shape-shifter," Maddie postulated. "Something to throw us off. Honey…whatever you see of Danny…he might only be the shape-shifter in disguise. Not our son."

Jack's vivid imagination brought forth his son in the place of Vlad but before he could go mad from the sight of his precious danno's blue eyes replaced by abyss, his brain tore the image away. "Yeah," he whispered, clinging tightly to the feeble filament of hope as one by one its strands parted.

With the silent grace of predators Jack and Maddie stepped softly on the second floor, the halls standing just as they had before, undisturbed by any specter. No flashes of poisonous green light or rumbling explosions broke the deathly stillness. Was their son dead? Rotting as that ghost was? Had a ghost sneak in and possess their son? Holding him in an ectoplasmic grip stronger than steel. Dread, worse than any fear, gnawed like an ulcer in their bellies. Danny's door loomed ominous as a coffin lid.

Both parents regarded the doorknob with rising bile and sinking chill in their bodies. Reluctance leadened their limbs and stoned their muscles. They did not want to know, not for certain, what lay beyond that door. If the corpse of their son, cruelly murdered while a facade of Vlad distracted them, lay behind that door Maddie and Jack wished for ignorance of the matter.

Or worse than a corpse of their son, a ghost of their son—a familiar, cherished face painted upon the ectoplasm of their worst enemy. And if their son was a ghost he would have no choice to be evil, as all ghosts were, and they would be forced to End him for the good of others, of their darling Jazz, of every other child in Amity Park.

This fear more than any other held their hands over the doorknob, unmoving. Time moved as if under the throes a nightmare until they could take no more indecision. Finally courage overcame fear and together their hands twisted the cold metal of the innocent doorknob. Yet they could not open the door.

Why them? They fit no criteria of a Scrooge. The hour before they had been full of Christmas spirit and being forced to leave their daughter at college only made them all the more grateful for family and Christmas.

Sweeping away such reason they turned the doorknob with the swift suddenness of setting a dislocated shoulder and entered the room, weapons primed to fire at any ghost dwelling within. Maddie, smaller and slighter, slipped in first—gun and ecto-staff primed to kill any threat to Danny. Jack loomed behind his wife, bazooka powered up like a canon upon a rampart. No dirty, filthy ghost should be causing any trouble on Christmas, but what could anyone expect from ghosts. They held nothing sacred. Look at Phantom, probably demolishing buildings on the same night that Santa flew around to give gifts to children everywhere. No doubt a ghost would kidnap Danny on Christmas.

Or worse.

If a specter was present no glow betrayed it. Fear once again crawled up their spines to nestle in their minds. A vision stung their brains of that Vlad-like ghost, the shape-shifter, deathly core sucking away life as it did life while hovering above their son's sleeping form like a spectre of death. Both parents snapped free of their paralyzed dread and flicked on the light.

They hoped within hearts full of Christmas spirit to see only their son relaxed in the depths of dream-time, sleeping the sound sleep of one untouched by ghosts. Pillow half-covering his face, one hand draped over the edge of the bed, his blankets cocooned around him. Their eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness, able now to pick out distinct shapes. Before their color-sparked eyes lay their son's bed, clear and neat as a Christmas present.

Without Danny.


	2. The First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you all so much for your comments and kudos and bookmarks! And sorry for the confusion, yes, this is cross-posted from my other account at Fanfiction.net, but thank ya'll for caring.
> 
> Without further ado: chapter two.

"A dream ghost!" Maddie shouted. Wrapping paper, presents, ribbons and bows cascaded away as she jumped off the couch. Jack's agonized 'Vladdie' resonated sharply to hypersensitive ears, her hairs bristled with the tense expectation of a specter's chill. No trace of any ghost remained; not the horrific resemblance to her one-time friend; not any Christmas spirits; not a more dreaded ghoul. "I should have known. Jack, did you just have a dream about Vlad."

"Dream," Jack whispered hollowly. Branded within his mind with searing intensity was the echo of his friend's dusty rasp through rotted, pitted vocal chords. A sound that would crawl beneath his skin for the rest of his days. He shivered now, as though movement could dislodge the cancerous memory. "That was not Vlad," he repeated to himself. "That was not Vlad, just a shape shifting ghost."

"Or a nightmare created by another ghost," Maddie pointed out. "Like Nocturne."

Jack focused on his wife's words, drinking them in and allowing reason to overpower fear. Fortified, he answered her question.

"Yes I had that dream, and he looked," words failed him. A haunted countenance passed over his face. "Horrible," Jack finished, returning to himself. "Deader than a ghost even, and he was threatening our son!" He growled, leaping to his feet. "But it was just a dream of course," Jack sank back to the couch, "The real Vlad would never threaten Danno."

"Exactly," Maddie let out a sigh of relief, "We should scan the house for whatever malevolent apparition did this and check up on Danny, just in case."

"He will not be there."

Again the husband and wife team aimed weapons at an echoing voice. Were they still trapped in a dream? Their living room was still festooned with wrapping paper, though crumpled; presents twinkled and tiny ghost lights glinting a deathly green against festive ribbons. How alike this scene was to their shared dream. Had the ghost trapped them in so many layers of nightmares that they were only going through another one?

One thing soothed their trembling hearts: the echoing voice which so startled them was not the rusted hoarse pitch of one who had murdered their voice crying out against the agony of death. This voice, echoing horribly as any ghost, was lighter, smoother and—odd as it was to apply the term to any ghost—more human than the tones of Vlad's false spirit. A pair of relieving sighs escaped their lips at the sight of the spirit, which would have disarmed most any viewer.

A child stared calmly beyond their weapons at the ghost hunters.

Light gentle as the coming dawn enveloped a buck-toothed toddler, blessedly whole and without decay, clothed in shades of purple. Chubby cheeks of soft greenish-blue tones were framed with an equally royal-hued hood which might have been intimidating on an adult ghost but only looked cute on such a young one. A translucent spirit-tail gave credence to the normality of the ghost; here was a spirit like they were used to dealing with and the thought fortified the Fentons. The form of a mere child was not enough to sway their weapons as it would have for many others. The experienced ghost hunters knew well spirits could exist for centuries, even millennia frozen in the forms they died or shift into more harmless forms.

Amid features of a precious boy were disconcerting, piercing blood-red eyes. Those eyes, which neither wavered nor blinked, gave an impression of age to the baby-soft face and plump, tiny child form. As the previous spirit had a death core, which permeated its very being, this child had a core of age. From those eyes blazed forth ancient wisdom no human could possibly live long enough to gain. Its solemn posture belayed any innocence, merely floating there, patient and silent, an aura of knowledge greater than the veritable Merlin. Childish features were set in an expression not of sternness but immobility that sternness wishes to grow into.

"Where is he!" shouted Maddie. "You show us our son right now!"

"That is my purpose," said the spirit. His voice, though the pitch of youth and cloaked in the softness of a child, was steeped in tones which did little to sooth parental dread. "He is imprisoned. And far worse will happen to him, and to you, if you do not follow me."

A blast of emerald fired from the Fenton bazooka, lighting the festive scene, darkening presents and decorations with an eerie green cast as it shot toward the child-spirit. Jack's reply.

"Show us our son now!" Jack growled, tone dark.

Before the strike could connect it unexpectedly froze exactly like someone pushed the pause button on a remote control. The spirit vanished. Neither Fenton could move. Casually the ghost once more appeared, as though stepping out from between moments in time. Neither smoke nor sound heralded its appearance as a normal teleporting ghost. The eerie emerald blast lighting it up from behind suddenly decided to move again and—otherwise unusually well aimed—hit the wall behind the trio.

Maddie struck.

Years of practice and hours of dedication had hammered her body into a weapon itself. From childhood she had pursued perfection in the martial art of war. Now, in her forties, perfectly balanced between youthful vigor and forged skill, her tiger-claw strike was almost faster than humanly possible. The new hazmat gloves she wore negated intangibility; she should have torn through the spook.

Her nails never touched this child-ghost. Reality got drunk and took a stumble sideways as the ghost held perfectly still, unfazed by existence's lurch or the hand that ruffled a purple hood instead of piercing eyes. Reality sobered up. Her trigger finger automatically squeezed, expecting the gun to react with a glare of ectoplasmic light.

The child palmed something important looking with the first distinctly child-like expression she'd seen on the ghost.

Her gun clicked.

Dropping the useless weapon Maddie snatched a short, metal baton from her belt. With a more ominous click and familiar hum a pair of light-sabers unfurled. Gripping the ecto-staff two-handed, she struck with all the strength of her whole body at the ghost. The heat of the laser staff combined with the power behind the strike should have instantly vaporized the unfortunate specter. Instead her staff was suddenly gone. Her hands clenched tightly around thin air, though Maddie never saw a movement, even a blurred one. Had someone stepped between seconds and plucked the weapon out of her hands in that timeless space? Maddie stumbled. Unseen force slammed into her diaphragm and stole her balance. She curled to turn her fall into a smooth roll but reality hiccupped—it had to be the ghost somehow—and hardwood floor slammed into her back.

Reality reversed itself.

When Maddie once more gained her bearings all she could do was heave a mighty breath against the darkness drowning her sight. That single wind-driving blow had been magnified a dozen times, or else her opponent had delivered a similar move to send her to the ground a dozen times. Her back muscles whimpered like they'd been tortured. Her lungs had been wringed of oxygen. Maddie dragged in another breath.

"You…are an annoying spirit."

The ghost of Christmas past—supposedly, what else could it be?—hovered above them, infuriatingly untouched. Arms folded across a royal purple tunic, red eyes more disapproving than any glare they'd given their children, wispy tail twitching in a manner that, had the spirit formed legs, would have been an impatient foot-tap.

"Finished?" it asked severely, "Your son hasn't time to waste."

Maddie bristled at those words—as though some evil ecto-monster could care about her son more than his own parents!—but said nothing. She was not broken but clearly beaten by what could only be a reality-warper. Her weapons were nowhere to be seen and though she breathed easier, every blow throbbed keenly. In mere seconds this ghost had been confronted with the best the best ghost hunters could muster and had flung it in their faces a dozen times over. No burn or scratch or bruise marred the specter. All her martial arts, weapons, training and even experience were useless.

Exchanging glances with her husband, who looked as bad as she felt, the parents came to the practical conclusion. In other circumstances the hard-headed ghost hunters would have kept fighting out of sheer determination to protect and help family until they dropped. But for their son, they could ally themselves with this ectoplasmic creep.

"And you will help our son? Help us save him?" Jack asked suspiciously.

The ghost met their stare with the full force of millennia of age, even Maddie, who had fearlessly met the gazes of some of the most powerful and terrible specters in the ghost zone, couldn't help but look away.

Only to check on her husband, of course.

It spoke in a graver voice. "Every action I take now is for the sake of your son's well-being and continued future. Come, we must hurry," and the boy offered both his hands to them.

Maddie and Jack would have loved the leisure to confirm beyond a ghost of a doubt that this apparition was speaking truly, but this ghost had defeated them both, their son's bed was empty and it offered help.

What choice did they have?

Carefully, expecting at any moment some manner of trap or trick, each took one hand of the boy ghost, keeping their other hands linked. Again the world warped around them. Cheery Christmas tree, gleaming lights, wild storm of wrapping paper and ribbons vanished from sight. The pair shot backwards, as though strapped to a roller coaster reversing itself, if the seats on said roller coaster were all washers set to disintegrate. Senses, bodies, minds felt torn apart, scattered across the universe before melding back together in the wrong order.

Everything stopped.

Maddie, who could handle her husband's driving better than a professional bull-rider, staggered to her feet; sense of balance turned inside out and sideways. Replacing the Fentonworks living room were normal decorating 'Toys for Tots' who catered to orphaned children.

"Their annual toy drive," Maddie whispered.

Hard white ice blanketed buildings and streets, formed icicles on the power-lines. Tiny pebbles underfoot—though no foot dared crush them at such an ungodly hour—as winter weather locked Amity in a bitter grip. Wind howled, an echo of the ancient ice-age beast it had once been and fell shrieking between alleyways and trees, forcing all to bow or break. This they could see. This they could hear.

They could not feel. Cold shot through them without a touch. No winter knife stabbed them, nor did a freezing raindrop's needle-chill kiss touch their cheeks or hands. Their footsteps should have been hampered by sleet, snow and ice, the mix was well over a foot high, yet their feet passed through like powder.

"What did you do to us? Are we ghosts?" Jack shouted.

"And what are we doing here?" asked Maddie, "You were supposed to take us to Danny!"

"And so I am." The spirit released them.

"Hold up, this isn't the Christmas Carol and we don't need to be here," Maddie argued. "We all donate toys to this place every year and even help wrap the presents. There's no need for us to watch, now take us to our son. You were the one who said we had no time."

"We have time enough to watch," said the spirit calmly, an odd smile on its youthful face. "See your son."

Christmas lights couldn't alleviate the foreboding feeling surrounding the building. In the absence of people and laughter and cheer, without the crowds of cars and press of bodies to ease the worst of the bitter cold the deserted building gained a haunted countenance. Even their new ghostly state, which allowed them to watch without shivering, could not melt the chill of foreboding.

A flash of white caught their attention in the darkness; the serpentine flight betrayed the figure as a ghost. When the specter slowed, hovering above the building, its identity was revealed. One the Fentons could hardly believe.

"But we have him in the basement!" Jack shouted.

"How did Phantom escape?" asked Maddie.

"Watch," said the spirit.

"How can we just watch, he's stealing Christmas presents! Those are for the orphans!" Jack leaped into the air, hoping flight came with intangibility. He hung in the air like a balloon. Obviously there was more to ghostly flight than a simple leap. A scientific part of Maddie wanted to test things further but kept to the ground. The child spirit snagged her husband's leg and gently tugged him back to earth as Phantom phased into the building. Moments later Amity Park's so-called hero escaped through the ceiling, laden with a present-bulged sack like the Grinch on Christmas Eve.

"Now see that, there's someone who needs a visit from three spirits, not us." Jack protested.

"Why is the wind picking up? The weather only predicted snow?" Maddie looked around again. The unfeeling winds picked up more force. Fierce, driving gales cut off speech and she had to shout to be heard above its howl, a ghost of the Pleistocene. Trees bowed and flags threatened to tear off. Wood and metal alike screeched under the onslaught of nature and before their horrified eyes a massive telephone pole crashed to the ground, felled by the unrelenting power of wind.

Ice shot through the air sideways. Had they been wholly human, Maddie did not doubt they would have been felled as well. "In the past. Oh of course," the puzzle pieces came together, "We had weather like this last year. You actually took us to the past?"

"Just like the Christmas Carol?" Jack asked.

"Exactly. Now come," said the spirit boy, "We must follow."

This time the childish hand seized them with shocking firmness for digits so small; Maddie could not break that iron grip. Lifting off it followed Phantom's wavering tail. Torrents of wind, no longer blocked by buildings, slashed with furious vengeance straight through them. Phantom flew fast as a hawk through the storm. Its shoulders were tucked and head hunched as though it struggled against the ice already coating it but carried the bulging sack easily as an empty one.

As fast as the ghost boy was, the boy spirit pulling them along flew faster, guiding them as though they were but feathers. Its ghostly tail moved with an easy, rhythmic grace and the swift winds did not once cause it to falter, though Phantom bucked and swerved like a kite in the wind. The ghostly teen was forced to clutch its burden close to better fight the wild will of the gale. Once more the Fentons cursed the spirit boy for disarming them. Phantom was almost close enough to touch.

As though reading their minds, the ghoul spoke, "All you see is merely a shadow of what has been and cannot be changed."

Though it appeared to take longer with the wind—something they could not interact with—and the cold—only a few moments passed before they reached the orphanage. Phantom dropped through the ceiling as swiftly as a human would rush through the door; they could almost believe it felt the cold daggers harsh winds drove. Maddie knew the truth. They, as spirits now, felt no difference between the icy chill of the blizzard outside and the warmth of a building. Phantom was faking, a fact as solid as the floor now beneath her feet.

Clearly this was the past. One of the three children guarding the Christmas tree had been adopted two months ago. The tree, a rather generously large donation—its top needed to be cropped to fit the room—was bejeweled and weighted with the same ornaments, sans the cookie decorations they helped the children make a few nights ago. Stockings dangled with slightly different names from yesterday. Cards, garland, snowflakes and even origami figurines filled the room with haphazard cheer of homemade charm. One dining table had a cookie plate faithfully set out for Santa, a glass of milk on the side.

Maddie began remembering the details of this particular Christmas past. "The blizzard that shut down the present delivery system," she remarked. "But the presents were delivered all the same."

"Proof that Santa really exists!" Jack said excitedly, ignoring Phantom as he set the presents down.

Maddie raised an eyebrow at their nemesis, to point out further evidence against her husband's ridiculous belief before realizing what a despicable idea to substituting Phantom for Santa Claus—even if he wasn't real. She did not want to admit being wrong about Santa Claus. No proof had been offered for his existence after all; however this led to the even more distasteful conclusion: Danny Phantom, a ghost, was responsible for the Christmas miracle during last year's blizzard and possibly many others.

"Part of its hero act," Maddie commented. "It is only doing this so everyone will see what a benevolent specter it is and ignore its evil Mayor-kidnapping, town-takeover, thieving ghostly ways. Look at it! Flaunting supposed generosity in front of all those children—never mind all the hard-working volunteers who wrapped those presents," she glared pointedly at their guide.

The spirit boy tugged them closer until the children's indistinguishable chatter became words.

"He's not going to come," said one boy sagely from his hiding-place behind the Christmas tree box. "Santa isn't even real; besides, the blizzard's so bad no one can fly through it."

"Of course he can," Jack boomed. "He's Santa. He can do anything." But of course none of the children heard this exclamation. "Have faith," he added sadly.

Another child, face contorted in a deep frown, whispered, "Santa is too real. You'll see. There'll be presents 'cause Santa can fly through North Pole weather. A mangy ol' blizzard ain't gonna stop 'im."

"Atta girl!" praised Jack.

"Why don't they notice Phantom," Maddie whispered. The ghost had slung the present-sack to the floor and was being terribly obvious putting the presents beneath the tree and even taking the time to sort them all out carefully. Show off. Three sets of avid eyes upon the tree—especially the silent third boy—should have noted the presents and spoken up. Yet the boy and the girl continued their argument and the third boy continued watching the decorated tree, both sets of fingers crossed white-knuckled tight.

"Who is that boy?" Maddie asked.

"Timothy Young, who lost his entire family a mere three weeks ago," answered their host.

"No doubt to ghosts!" Jack shouted.

"The Guys in White took his family away due to supposed ecto-contamination," the Christmas spirit said.

"But…they'll be back," Maddie asked hesitantly, trying to remember this particular boy. There was something about his parents.

"Yes," the spirit said gravely. "They will be."

"It's only the volunteers who deliver them," said the first boy, providing welcome relief unsettling dread the spirit's voice invoked. "You have to face reality and the reality is that there will be no—"

"Presents!" The younger boy shrieked, drawing their attention at last to the pile of gifts Phantom finished sorting out.

"Oh I knew he'd come!"

"Santa's real! Santa's real!"

Now the children saw presents. Had the ghost kept them and itself invisible until the last moment? What a showman. For an instant Timothy's despair was lifted and the orphan dove towards the pile, searching desperately, "Santa is real. Oh, I hope he got my letter." More softly, only those spirits listening could hear, he added, "I wanted something very special."

Suddenly the orphan jumped, realizing Phantom's appearance at last. He turned toward the ghost, who was smiling softly, holding its infamous thermos—that it stole!—in one hand. Unfortunately like most children, this one held more admiration towards Phantom than fear or common sense, because he approached the ghost. "Did you help deliver the presents for Santa?" he asked.

"Yes I did," said the ghost boy softly, "And I heard you had a very special request."

Had their son suddenly appeared in the room, delivered by Santa Claus himself, the Fentons could not have possibly matched the hope in the boy's dark eyes. So bursting with gladness he seemed a second from crying as a real smile stretched unused muscles from ear to ear. Maddie couldn't help but hope with him that Phantom got the very special gift and damn the danger of Phantom associated as a hero. She could not have killed Timothy's hope, not after seeing it in the flesh. Phantom knelt in front of the boy, hidden from the other two exclaiming children by the voluptuous tree and opened the thermos. "Merry Christmas."

Out floated a pair of ghosts, so similar in feature and posture to the little orphan they had to be his parents. The boy's smile vanished, his eyes gleamed brighter. His cheeks grew wet and the orphan dove for his parents, ectoplasmic entities though they were.

"They're not your parents," Maddie sighed, shaking her head. "They're only cruel shades. Mirages. Illusions. They can't feel."

These ghosts must have taken lessons from Phantom, for when they wrapped their arms around him as though Timothy were the most precious thing in the world, cuddling him close. "Angel, angel my little angel, shh, shh."

"Its…they're crying," Jack whispered.

At first Maddie thought her husband meant the child, but those ghostly faces were in full view and…What could only be tears, glowing, green-tinged tears, dripped down the faces of the ghosts as they held their son once more.

"Ghosts can't cry," Maddie whispered. "Oh this is fascinating!"

"I'll make sure no one disturbs you," Phantom said. Carefully it floated away, giving the reuniting family privacy—or lured by a plate of cookies and glass of milk. The ghost sat down, put the plate on its lap and picked up the cup to enjoy. Gluttonous ghost. The shouting children had woken still more children and several adult caretakers, who crowded around the tree as delighted as the children and as loud in expression. None of them appeared to notice Phantom and the normally alert ghost teen didn't seem to notice the ghost hunters either.

"Can it see us?" Jack waved a hand at Phantom's face.

"These are the shadows of the past to whom we are not present," their spirit guide answered.

"In simpler words, no," Maddie concluded.

No ghost could mimic human facial expressions like Phantom. It reclined against the table, cookie in one hand, milk in the other, an eye on the reuniting family, gaze occasionally flickering to the joyful children hauling out the presents and stockings. It blinked rapidly and a feeble smile spread across its face, as if it could take some joy in the belief of the children who's Christmas it had brightened.

But of course the expression was just an illusion.

"Mr. Phantom," whispered Timothy.

"Yes?" the ghost asked, dropping to the floor again.

"Thank you for bringing my parents. Can you make sure they get to the ghost zone safely too."

"Of course," it whispered.

"We love you so much Timmy," said the father softly.

"I know."

"We wouldn't want to leave you," added the mother. "Only…"

"I know, it's dangerous. All the ghost hunters," suddenly Timothy turned worried eyes towards Phantom. "You'll protect them…right?"

"I will. I promise," Phantom said solemnly.

"Come. There is more," said the boy spirit, tugging the Fentons away. The three departed, unseen by these shadows of the past, leaving the equally unseen Phantom to its promise. Neither Maddie nor her husband liked that idea, for the ghost could still turn upon the helpless children, but this was the past, things had obviously turned out alright. Else they would have known about the resulting tragedy.

Once more the world warped around them and in a flash of blinding light they found themselves in another Christmas, following Phantom to another destination through slightly less deplorable weather.

"What does that ghost think it is," Jack commented, "Santa Claus?"

The Spirit of Christmas Past managed, in spite of Phantom's fantastic speed in comparatively mild weather, to fly the ghost hunters close enough to read the inscription upon the present's tag: "To William Lancer from Santa Claus." Within moments they had arrived at a house, owned by Danny's English Teacher. The bedecked room's walls were buried beneath bookshelves and each of these, built of strong oak, sagged beneath overflowing volumes. Christmas decorations took over nearly as much space, and yet a certain lonely aura lingered upon them. These were not decorations set up by family or friends but painstakingly by a single person without kith or kin. The cookies and glass of milk set out and devoured by the same person, only spoke of isolation.

Worse were the gifts. Though presents aplenty lay beneath bejeweled limbs, without fail every single one was labeled as: "To Lancer, From Lancer."

"When we get home with Danny, we ought to see if Mr. Lancer would like to join us," Jack whispered.

Maddie nodded in agreement and forced herself not to replace 'when' with 'if'. Of course Danny was going to be alright. Everything would be fine.

If only this stupid ghost stopped focusing so much on Phantom and started focusing on their human son. What did one spook matter? Or three. In the grand scheme of things Mr. Lancer's expression of confused gratefulness at the mere sight of a present he had not bought and wrapped for himself wasn't as important as a missing child.

"Okay, fine, we've seen that Phantom can," Maddie took a harsh breath; she needed to be convincing, "Express human emotions. Now about our son?"

"You still do not see." The child spirit shook its head.

Maddie's hands clenched to fists, fighting for control. Where was her son? Why was this ghost only showing them Phantom? While irrational, ghosts were very predictable creatures once their obsession was figured out. This one was obsessed with the Christmas Carol story, had put them in the role of Scrooge, but shouldn't it show them their son and how it thought they messed him up? Why show them Phantom?

Blinding light and nausea-inducing motion once more enveloped them. How many Christmases were they going through? Or were these events part of the same Christmas? Searing light died. The world behind their eyelids grew comfortingly dim again when they opened their eyes.

They were blind.

This new time was engulfed in the dead of night, far from any man-made light, with stormy clouds overwhelmed whatever feeble natural light fell from the heavens, showed them nothing. From below their feet to the highest point of the fathomless sky blackness reigned. Their eyes adjusted to discern a slightly deeper; obsidian black from the leaden black the world had resolved itself into.

Other senses picked up clues of this new place. An all-encompassing crash like the breath of water echoed from everywhere at once. The heavy scent of salt clogged their noses.

They were out at sea.

Without sight or touch—a fault of intangibility—neither Fenton could discern whether the wind was calm or wild, though the froth of the waves was far from tranquil. No dead fish stench or seaweed mixed in with the briny scent. No waves crashed upon any beach.

They were far out at sea.

Eyes adjusted enough to separate a shape within obsidian waters. Maddie glowered at the indefinable shape—a ship—and knew which disastrous Christmas their ghastly guide brought them to. This serendipitous rescue was the beginning of the end for ghost hunters as the vessel contained a great many important and influential people. Had Phantom not performed this rescue, the Fentons could have advertised their capture, publishing findings openly, rather than covering it up like a crime.

That, Maddie thought, was the truly insidious nature of Phantom's so-called charity. Humans found themselves obligated to their saviors. Reciprocal altruism was born and bred within everyone, as instinctual as fight or flight. All people—save the truly deranged—had it. No ghost did. Alone of all ghosts Phantom knew how to take advantage of this uniquely human tendency to gain dominion over humanity. The dead had conquered the living and they loved it for doing so.

Seas enraged by wild storms like none upon land tore at the vessel like the claws of a great beast. However massive the vessel was, however steady in placid seas, surrounded by the wrath of the ocean, devoured by water, the ship was a toy between children attempting to out-splash each other. Though Maddie's sense of touch was dead from intangibility her hearing was not and as they drew closer, over the roar of water and wind she heard screams.

Their guide brought them closer still.

People clutched like limpets onto anything they could hold with translucent knuckles. Some were too frightened to scream, gripping their lifelines too rigidly with every ounce of strength they possessed. Only those trapped within the confines of relatively safe walls had the strength to spare for a sound.

Maddie reached for one young woman, eyes screwed shut, clinging to a literal rope with everything she had—her hands, her legs, even her teeth were clamped down on sea-soaked fibers. The ghost hunter's hand passed right through the unfortunate person as the spirit hauled them onward. Both Fentons heaved a sigh of relief as a light, like a firefly against a johnboat, appeared before the massive ship.

She might hate the spook for its false pretenses, but even she could not steal rescue away from so many desperate people struggling for life. Little Phantom looked so insignificant Maddie doubted, despite her foreknowledge, he could be of any help. The ghost swooped alongside the struggling vessel, glow muted in the storm and for a moment floated next to one of the windows, seemingly at leisure.

This illusion was given lie by the look upon young Phantom's face: its jaws welded rock-solid together, eyes clenched tightly shut and its furrowed brow etching deep lines of concentration on its face. This was no holiday. Out of the thin air, three other Phantoms appeared, each tiny insects next to that great behemoth of a vessel.

"So the rumors are true, it has some sort of duplication powers," Maddie commented.

"Wonder why it doesn't use those more often," Jack asked to himself. Neither had actually seen the feat themselves.

Four tiny Phantoms encircled the ship, one to the starboard, one to the port, two more trailing behind to the back. The Christmas ghost guided the hunters closer, once more Maddie could have struck it if her hand wouldn't have passed right through white hair. But even with her gun, she would have stayed her hand until everyone was rescued. Completely ignorant of the ghost hunters, two fore-Phantoms pitted their strength against the ship, prying massive weight from the relentless sea.

Watching the ghost boy wrench the ship from sea was like watching a weightlifter attempting to break a record. The sea was afroth with jealous rage. Grasping, clawing waves gripped with abysmal strength, a scorpion against a tiny midget fly. The ship was so very weighty with the bulk of thousands of people and the metal and wood and furniture and fabric to support them all; every pound of weight fought movement. The ghost-teen's lips curved in a snarl of pain and determination. Teeth dug into teeth, muscles roiled like waves themselves beneath the sopping material of its jumpsuit, face flushed bright green with exertion. Veins stood out, tendons braced like sail-ropes in a storm but the ship still rocked and sagged. Phantom's struggle was a futile one; inch by inch the ship floated back to the ocean, despite the drops of water—sea spray or sweat—running in rivers down the ghost's face.

A mere facade of struggle, Maddie reminded herself. The ghost could have easily been putting on a show for the passengers watching from above. Perhaps unaware no passenger could see its faux strain in such complete darkness. Had anyone noticed Phantom—a single glance above was enough to realize the people aboard the ship had yet to notice anything less than disastrous—they couldn't possibly perceive its human form, let alone expression from such a distance. With the ship hovering only inches off the ocean likely no one realized they were floating on air instead of water.

One moment the ghost strained, bloodless-lipped, face burning like the Fenton portal, bullets of sweat dripping off its brow, hands clenched like vices, limbs vibrating with the ship's weight. The next Phantom's strained features went slack. Had it been human the Fentons would have sworn its heart gave out. The first runner of the marathon must have worn such lifeless features the instant he stopped. All four copies suddenly went limp and the ship dropped as an anvil back to the water, the Phantoms flung into the ocean.

All four copies floated toward the ship, slumping like corpses against the sides, the greatest chunk of their strength devoured attempting to lift the vessel. One duplicate flickered like a dying light bulb. Despite foreknowledge, Maddie doubted the ghost would try again. Surely the shivering, panting spirit wouldn't dare risk disintegrating from another try. Yet as desperate breaths revived it, Phantom righted itself. The flickering copy solidified. Four identical faces and postures hardened, as though the ghost had transformed into stone and steel. They set themselves for a second attempt, though all rationality would say a more futile one.

The duplicates phased their arms through the ship and once more heaved with strength and will beyond any record-breaking athlete. With muscles clenched to iron strength and jaw gritted to iron prowess the ship rose, a Phantom at each side, all identical down to the slick, white, dripping hair limp above green eyes as hard and intense as emeralds. With almost unnoticeable increments, the ship rose above the water. Though it was now a foot or more beyond the pull of water, such was the vessel's vastness that Jack and Maddie could have kept up at a leisurely stroll. Yet, by still more unnoticeable increments, with each Phantom pushing the vessel through tar-like darkness, it gained speed.

With the sea no longer thrashing against metallic sides, the ship steadied. Blood flowed through translucent knuckles once more as terror drained away from people. Eyes opened. Screams dimmed. Panicked crowds began to realize something had changed. Fear turned to curiosity. As though climbing up a rock wall, passengers switched grips from rope to post with trembling hands, heading for the railing. In total darkness nothing could hide the glow of the four identical Phantoms from all those searching eyes.

"Look!" Someone shouted.

At that call and a dark finger pointed in the darker sea toward a spark of light amid the abyss, eyes turned. Necks craned. Screams faded. By their guide's floating light Maddie could see the expressions of the closest passengers. None were from Amity Park.

Had any been residents of Amity Park they would have recognized instantly the truth: it was a ghost. They would, knowing of ghosts, recognized Phantom's true nature—though in recent times most of Amity's residents blinded themselves to that truth. Beyond the town, though people heard of ghosts, they rarely believed.

An angel flying down from the heavens to rescue the ship could scarcely have inspired this awe upon people's faces. Others might have mistaken Phantom for a superhero. To their eyes the ghost was a guardian lifting them from the wild torrent of death and toward the safe heavens of life. Its undead glow was the only light within the darkness. With its white hair and deceptively human appearance—oft described as angelic—such a conclusion would be easy. Dangerous, but easy.

The sea's stormy roar began to die beneath another sound. Wild, exuberant cheering rose from a thousand relieved throats, minds awash with a cocktail of rapture: knowledge they were alive, hope they would make it and teary-eyed joy from a Christmas miracle. Whole crowds surged to the four corners of the ship where the Phantoms lifted, rocking the ship dangerously as its burden shifted wildly.

Then, at a snail's crawl, the Fentons saw an odd change sweep over the ship and its people, emanating from gloved hands. Intangibility rippled through the ship and not a moment too soon as the ship had been, by near unnoticeable degrees, drifting downward.

Ghostly power did not reduce the ship's weight for Phantom, especially as it had to become intangible to best use this power. Yet wind flew right through the ship, unable to offer resistance. Threatening waves clawed futilely through it and without fighting nature's forces Phantom pushed the vessel to greater speed. From a leisurely pace the ship sped to one the Fentons were hard-pressed to keep up with, then one their ghostly guide had to fly them alongside.

Every burst of speed was a hard-fought battle; Phantom's arms vibrated alarmingly, its eyes nearly screwed shut as it flew and lifted from sheer willpower alone. For the benefit of the crowd, Maddie mentally added, though that proven conclusion came with less surety than usual. The ghost's struggles may have been fake, but lifting and hauling such a massive vessel had to cost it real energy and the journey was no short one. Across a sea of darkness, like an abyss of hell, they flew and Phantom carried its burden like a cross.

Finally in the distant horizon another shade of black appeared. At the sight Phantom found renewed heart. The ship sailed faster. Miles of ocean flew by far below. Land grew closer. Trembling like hummingbird wings, the four Phantoms carefully docked the massive ship at the nearest port. Two duplicates flickered out of sight the instant the ship touched calm water. The Phantom they had been watching—how had their spirit guide known which was real?—grimaced as though twice shot before plummeting. The remaining copy swooped toward the original, merging with the real Phantom. It floated like a balloon cut adrift, neck hanging as though broken from fatigue.

Until it heard cheering.

By now the entire crowd was screaming and cheering and waving and leaping at him, all sense overcome with the exuberance of being alive and safe. Phantom's head lifted, its body managed to straighten up. The creature turned, give the overwhelmed people a salute and a smile and even looked a tiny bit less weary as it did so. It soared away, a smile on its face, to wave happily at the grateful crowd. Cocky attention-seeking ghost.

"Woah!" Jack shouted as the spirit boy suddenly yanked them after the fleeing Phantom. Their guide dove like a falcon just to keep up. Now out of sight of the ship, it was flying at astonishing speeds. This, in Maddie's mind, only proved Phantom faked at least some of his exhaustion to be capable of such flight. Yet her eagle eyes noted how its ghost-tail slumped to the side as it flew, unmoving.

Once the trio of odd spies caught up with Phantom, Maddie realized why the ghost's flight was so odd. Its body was completely limp, its spectral tail shifting into a pair of legs, its glow feeble as a dying flame, eyes peacefully shut. Phantom wasn't flying.

It was falling.

Earth loomed large, but seconds before crashing—perhaps warned by supernatural instinct—the ghost's eyes snapped open. Intangibility surged through it like adrenaline, jerking its body off the ground. Ghostly legs slid through the earth before it clawed out with flight, managing six feet of height before dropping like a stone with a very tangible thud. All Maddie could see was a tangle of limp limbs. It did not stir.

"What's wrong with it?" Jack asked.

"Even the most powerful ghosts can tire, and he has pushed himself terribly hard," their spiritual guide answered.

Phantom dragged its hands beside its chest, planted them to the ground and pressed, lifting itself up by trembling arms. Its knees crawled toward a chest heaving with feeble mimicry of life. Suddenly, as joints bent to get to its knees, Phantom collapsed once more. Shivers wracked its fallen form.

"It really is good at this," Jack said absently. "The whole exhausted thing…pretending of course."

"Phantom has to have had a lot of practice by now," Maddie said. "It's been doing this for at least…two years now, maybe more. Stopping ghosts and getting into fights all hours of the day and night. Don't let it fool you." Even as those tired words passed her lips, the ghost hunter was herself struck by the vividness and accuracy of Phantom's human emotions and body language. Any other watcher, aside from the GIW, would have believed the ghost's exhaustion. Yet they were alone and the thought occurred to her: perhaps the ghost of Christmas past had spoken the truth; Phantom didn't know they were there.

Until it leapt away with revitalized speed from an ecto-blast, one that would have torn a hole neatly through the chest. Pink energy sprayed dirt harmlessly into the air beside Phantom, lying prone in the dirt. The ghost hunters followed its weary green gaze upward. Like a hunting hawk, just above the canopy, circled a familiar red and black form.

"Hah, I knew it was performing for an audience," Maddie crowed.

"Aww come on Val, it's practically Christmas," the ghost whined.

"And you're making me miss it with my father," the mysterious huntress spat in a surprisingly youthful voice. A familiar voice. Where had she heard it before?

"Then how about we go our separate ways." The ghost's words crashed her thoughts. "You leave and enjoy Christmas with your father and I can get back to my family. Deal?"

"Ghosts have no family." Red Huntress fired another shot at the prone ghost.

Once more Phantom dodged. Well, to be fair Maddie couldn't have called that a dodge, more of a flop by someone who'd burned their last strength.

A magenta beam shot into his arm, searing flesh like a shovel scooping through earth. The ghost hissed, instinctively clawing at the burning wound. Perhaps Phantom wasn't wholly faking the extent of its exhaustion. "My cousin," it replied shortly, cradling its arm to its chest while floating slowly backwards. "And as much as I'm enjoying this, I'd much rather spend time with her." A massive redwood loomed directly behind it. Maddie opened her mouth to warn the huntress. "Goodbye."

At the last word two things happened at once: the ghost phased through a tree of such girth all of Fentonworks could have comfortably fit in its base and, familiar with the ghost's tricks,—more so than the Fentons—Huntress fired again. Her shot hit Phantom's center mass. Maddie's unheard warning died unneeded.

"Argh!" Phantom staggered through the tree. Huntress's second shot collided with wood, sending shards of tree everywhere. The ghost re-appeared, arms wrapped around its torso, to crash into the ground right behind the redwood.

"Ugh, I am so tired of eating turf," it groaned.

"Hurry! You've got him!" Maddie shouted. As though she heard, the Huntress swerved around the massive tree, gun glowing and primed. Phantom propped its upper body with shaking arms, ectoplasm smeared its chest. Red Huntress pulled the trigger.

Phantom launched itself in the air on arm-strength alone, falling as much as flying through tree and brush alike. Shot after shot it evaded with more luck than skill. Red Huntress gave chase, looming above the ghost. Another shot struck it but the ghost hunter paid for her success with a tree blotting her vision. Phantom pulled ahead as she stopped, swerved and sped up.

Any specter worth their intangibility would simply fly through the densest vegetation and lose a hunter attempting to follow them, making forest the worst place to chase a ghost. Red Huntress took advantage of her hover-board's flight; the low-lying brush was no obstacle to her as to Maddie. Trees still worked against her; aiming accurately while dodging them taxed even her impressive skills. Halting to aim would allow Phantom to truly disappear but tree by tree the gap between hunter and hunted widened.

Phantom vanished. No, wait, there it was, looking more transparent than before, as it flew out another tree. Huntress was forced to switch on a ghost-tracker.

"Is it invisible now?"

"Yes," their ghostly guide said. Maddie started, she had almost forgotten the specter, though it allowed them to keep pace.

Against a temperate rain-forest, Huntress lost the race. Thickening webs of branches and bush and vines cut her off from her quarry. Her tracking device's beeping died as the ghost flew out of range. With a snarl and a curse the human huntress broke off the chase, despite her admirable zeal. Maddie felt for her; how many times had similar frustration burned her.

The Christmas spirit pulled them toward a white flash where they saw Phantom collapsing on its knees. Hair hung to the ground, arms tightened around its torso where green blood flowed. Slowly it tilted to the side, falling to the ground like a felled tree, trembling and gasping. A whale beached on land too far from the safety of the sea.

Maddie had once seen Danny in that awful position, in the aftermath of a ghost attack.

"Are we done yet? Danny is missing and Phantom obviously turned out fine," growled Jack, glaring at their host.

"All in good time," the child-ghost said, unperturbed. "We've one more thing to see."

Maddie clenched her teeth around an exasperated scream at the infuriating specter. "Do you even care about Danny?"

Their host turned a cool, calm, ruby-eyed gaze upon them both. "You do not see." It said, as though this were the most unspeakable of crimes.

"I see perfectly clear!" Jack suddenly shouted, "I see Phantom, a ghost, escaping ghost hunters and spoiling Christmas just as it always does while we don't even know what happened to our son!" For a brief moment true agony twisted Jack's features, agony of the heart to which physical agony is only a pale shade. Without weapons, with nothing but bare hands, he charged the child-ghost. "Give us our son back!"

Maddie sprung to battle beside her husband but fared no better as a ghost than a human. Less, without her weapons. They were simply frozen down to the breath in their lungs, not in ice as Phantom did but in time. The Christmas spirit did not glare down at them or lose any of its calmness but Maddie thought its glare was a trifle stonier.

"Look harder."

Blinding light enveloped the couple, followed by the familiar sensation of going through a time-warp. Once more they could move and turned toward a familiar voice. The so called protector knelt next to a bundle of net which might have been empty but for the odd thrashes it gave every so often.

"Calm down, I'll have you free in a moment," reassured Phantom as it worked several more fibers loose.

Once most of the net had been carefully untangled, the captured ghost was revealed: a specter no older than their guide—in looks. Phantom carefully eased the net off the trapped spirit and flung it away. It took the other ghost in its arms and whispered words of comfort.

"It's all over now, let's get you back home. Where do you live?" it asked gently.

"The candy store," the younger spirit answered. "But they said Santa was at the orphanage. Was he?"

Phantom's lips smoothed in a soft, parental smile, "Yes he was, but you know how Santa can be everywhere at the same time?"

"How?"

"Because he's a part of us and we're all parts of him. That's what the spirit of Christmas really is. When you give, you are Santa to someone else."

It smiled, bright and joyous and innocent in a way ghosts couldn't really feel. "I wanna be Santa!"

"You'll make a great Santa."

"That," Jack paused, conflict on his face. "I used to say that to Danny."

Maddie stared at the pair of ghosts, about to scoff at the notion of Phantom being anything like Jack or the little ghost girl bearing any resemblance to their darling boy. Yet she could not immediately dismiss the resemblance. The expression on Phantom's face was uncomfortably Jack-like at her husband's most tender and caring.

As though she had needed glasses all along and someone handed her the right prescription, other resemblances became clear: its hair was like Jack's used to be, its brows exactly like her husband's. The spirit of Jack haunted the shape of its upper face and the child was clinging to Phantom's jumpsuit exactly like Danny used to cling to his father's.

That could not be a coincidence.

She started awake, a horrific conclusion lingering in her mind like a reflection glimpsed from the corner of her eye. If only she turned her head, she would see...

"Danny!" Jack shouted. Their son was in danger and he had been sleeping.

Properly awake now, two pairs of feet hit the floor running. Without thought to any stealth the ghost hunters rushed up the stairs and flung their son's bedroom door open. His curtains were closed, shrouding any light from the window. Only the hallway Christmas decorations and their drawn ecto-weapons lit the room. Enough to shed light upon the truth.

A bed could be discerned in the darkness, its sheets immaculately folded and without wrinkle or crease of use. The pillow was fluffed, its pristine surface undisturbed by a sleeping head. Not a dip dented the mattress, showing sharply the absence of the sleeper who should have been there. Their son was gone. Maddie only had a memory of him in mind, looking a little like Jack.

Just like Phantom.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: A Christmas Carol is one of my favorite stories and I always love seeing it modified for my favorite fandoms. Since I couldn't find a Danny Phantom Christmas Carol I decided to write it, especially since the show lends itself so well to Christmas Carol: Vlad as Marley, the (half-dead) partner, the Fentons as Scrooges and Danny (sort of) as a combination Tiny Tim/Bob Cratchit.
> 
> Happy Holidays!


	3. The Second

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you all so much for all your wonderful, thoughtful comments! I loved them and I'm glad to hear I'm doing the Christmas Carol justice.

Jack and Maddie moved as one, Jack for Danny's closet, flinging open the door to his son's old hiding place. Maddie pried the bed off the floor, hoping with some insane hope to find her son lying beneath as he was occasionally wont to. Yet both bed and closet were barren of Danny. The ghost had been telling some portion of the truth. Something was wrong with their son; otherwise he would be here, asleep in bed and safely awaiting Christmas morning…well, later Christmas morning anyway.

"That spirit, it told us to see—," Jack said.

"—A connection," Maddie finished. "Between Danny and Phantom." She gave an exasperated groan, "But how could a human and a ghost possibly have a connection—ectoplasm doesn't work like that."

"Maybe we need to look outside the box?"

"Maybe this is all just a dream by some evil spirit!"

"A dream it may be, but that does not make it any less real." The echoing voice left no doubt a second spirit haunted them. Once more Jack was back to face with a ghost and he whirled around, the steady bazooka a gimlet eye glaring at the speaker.

Jack adjusted his aim up. Had his mind been filled with anything less than parental protection, had his body been galvanized with anything less than the need to save his offspring, even he, the great Jack Fenton, would have been cowed by the specter hovering before them.

The first spirit had appeared a young child in size and on a very primitive level; the size difference had soothed him. Defeating the greatest ghost hunters in the world aside, it had been only about the size Danny had been when he was three or four. Those scant years invited an instinctual comfort entirely separated from his keen ghost hunter's mind and forged instincts. The first spirit had soothed him with the illusion of weakness and Jack and his wife had fallen for it. Forgetting its power and speaking abruptly and sharply with a creature that could have killed them. Or unmade them entirely.

This new spirit stood head, shoulders and waist above the Fentons, horns phased through the ceiling of their home. Such was the breadth of its shoulders that it would either have to turn sideways or use intangibility to step through a door built to accommodate Jack's girth. Atop a swarthy throat shrouded in almost mane-like fur was a muzzle like that of the largest prehistoric bears. Short, powerful jaws were filled with the massive fangs of a monster. One limb of its furred body was stripped to the bone and clad wholly in ice. Yet its smile (fangs and all) was somehow disarming.

"Fenton family! Though less terrible circumstances I would like, it is still an honor," the ghost's boisterous manner dropped to cold severity, "If no joy to meet you."

"Where's our son?" Jack demanded.

"Right to the rotten core of the matter. Come, let us find him," it held out a clawed paw.

"Oh no you don't," Maddie snapped. "We've been through this with the first spirit showing us nothing but Phantom faking human emotions. If we wanted to see that we'd turn on the news channel. Now stop the whole Christmas Carol charade and take us to our son!"

Though Maddie's voice was harsh as a tiger's roar and she looked every inch the resemblance of that lethal predator, the ghost was unfazed as a stone. "Taking you to your son is my duty this night."

Maddie's eyes narrowed in suspicion, "Really…because there's some sort of connection between Danny and Phantom."

"No way!" Jack shouted automatically, but the same inventive intuition granting him genius ideas told him Mads was onto something.

"Excellent, you are seeing. To wisdom the first step you have taken and for your son's sake as well."

"What kind of connection?" Jack asked.

"Alas, even our greatest scientists only barely understand that which allows the Great One his unique nature." A glimmer of humor appeared in frozen eyes, "But would you the word of a ghost take? Especially without sight of it to confirm the connection yourselves?"

"Will Phantom save Danny?" Jack asked.

The yeti-like ghost pondered this question with a philosopher's thoughtfulness, "I firmly believe he has saved your son. Saved him and allowed him to grow beyond any expectation anyone else had pondered…though I admit to a little bias in that matter."

"But he's not going to this time?" Maddie concluded.

The ghost, who had so far been friendly, despite its large size, gave a very stern glare: "He cannot." Its voice was icy, "And Clockwork, mysterious worker as he is, prevented me and my army from rightly freeing the Great One, choosing the more peaceful path instead. Now come, if disaster is to be averted, more wisdom you must gain."

Hesitantly Jack laid his hand in the spirit's, his wife taking its other hand and the Christmas ghost seized them in a grip greater than the best his wife could deliver. Had Jack his wife's martial skill he still wouldn't have had a prayer of breaking that steely grasp. Before either of them could ask who 'Clockwork' was, Danny's room folded and warped around them as though the scene was a piece of paper being folded into another shape. The sensation of going from one place to another was different, not the rush of time itself passing or being sucked through a tunnel. Ghost of Christmas Present, he remembered from the story, so they were still in the here and now. Just not in the same where.

He was surprised to feel a gasp of heat.

After so much time—though the passage of time has been confusing these last minutes or days—in a ghostly sort of state where everything from blizzards to the inside of Fentonworks felt no warmer or colder, feeling again was a shock. An unpleasant shock. This was neither the heat of a too-high thermostat on an unseasonably warm day, nor the broiling heat of a dark car on the hottest August days. This harsher heat emanated from something worse. Jack jerked away on instinct from the sudden heat and light and searched for the Fenton Fire Extinguisher.

Which was nowhere in sight.

Some things were supposed to be certain ways on Christmas. Christmas fire was supposed to be cheery and warm to drink hot coco in front of, or eat fudge beside, or roast marshmallows over. A hearth family and friends gathered around and told stories—and only some of them were ghost stories. The essence of a Christmas fire.

This raging blaze had, fueled by gas and rotten drywall, transformed into a towering monster; a roiling inferno like a great ghost itself engulfing the unfortunate apartment building, consuming with ravenous, famine appetite. Deep, magma reds mixed with vibrant fiery oranges and white-hot hues that burned the eyes to glimpse. Fire coughed forth brackish smoke like the breath of hell. For a moment Jack's heart froze as a terrifying conclusion leapt into his brain.

His son was in that building.

Dazzling white against the smoke caught Jack's eye as Phantom vanished into the building. A beat passed and a clump flew from the top of the building to the ground. The ghost was nearly unrecognizable beneath everyone clinging to him. People coughed and hacked, covered in ash and stained with smoke to a dismal gray color the very antithesis of Christmas, but they all crawled away alive. For once Jack was almost relieved to see the ghost boy, that could be counted on to make itself look good by rescuing people. If his son was in there, Phantom would not leave him behind, if only for the sake of glory and the chance to convince the Fentons of its charade.

Taking to the sky, Amity Park's former Public Enemy Number One shot to the top story, transformed into a volcano's peak by fire. Amid heaving black belches of smoke the Fentons could barely discern a literal mob of people awaiting rescue, hands outstretched like zombies to seize the ghost. Grasping fingers clamped onto Phantom's wrists and dragged it down until the ghost was devoured beneath bowed heads, clawing nails and the weight of dozens. A lump of people rose from the mob and swooped toward the ground. Phantom phased itself out of them, flying back up for more. Again and again it flew into blistering heat and choking smoke and always came away with bunches of people. A dozen at least every time poured off from it or else it had to phase out of their hold but the ghost's efforts made no dent. The building had no end of dwellers in need of saving; however massive the crowd upon the ground swelled, Phantom always returned from that smoking, flaming building with another clinging ball of people.

The ghost teen changed too. Its hair, once bright as its aura, began to dirty with smoke, fading from an unnatural hue to the dismal gray of asphalt-stained snow. So too was the fate of anything else white upon it—boots, gloves, collar, symbol all turned from blinding white to dismal gray. From there they darkened still further with ash until no symbol could be discerned on its chest. The keenest eye could no longer tell white from black and its hair hadn't a single steak of white or gray in inky strands.

With every load of people Phantom's glow dimmed until the light no longer muddled the iconic face. Like gauze lifted away Phantom's features became more defined without the subtly cloaking ghostly aura blinding its finer details. Brilliant green eyes dulled as minutes turned to hours of toil before flaring with defiant power against the flame. Cool, icy blue lit the palms of its hands and blotted out the green of its eyes as ice poured forth. Phantom fought heat with cold. Chilling power forced fire to shrink away whenever it passed through flame in a journey for another group of people. Those people clung all the more tightly to the cold as the ghost guided them to the ground.

Once more Phantom rose from the latest rescued crowd, standing rather than floating. Its hair was pitch black from soot and its eyes flashed icy blue, these features all the more visible for the lack of ghostly glow upon the tired figure. With feet planted firmly on the ground the ghost looked so much like a human even Jack, had he been ignorant, would not have been able to tell otherwise. Yet such a realization was not what widened his eyes or stalled his horrified mind. No, that was the combination of sooty-black hair and blue eyes condensing a thousand little familiar cues in Phantom's visage to a more recognizable face.

"Danno?" Jack whispered.

The resemblance wasn't perfect to his relief. His Danny didn't have such cold eyes, as blue as ice. His little boy wouldn't wear such a worn, weary, old expression. His features wouldn't be set in such stony, grim purpose. The ghost's hair was a dead shade of black that choked all other colors. And of course Danno wouldn't become a filthy ghost; the Fentons had sat their children down many times and lectured them on the matters of death and the afterlife. His terrified heart slowed as he dismissed that first impossible, horrific conclusion. Phantom couldn't be their Danny, who had at least been alive in the years since Phantom showed up.

Yet Phantom's skin had paled over the hours until the shade was the twin of Danny. The way their mouths twisted with resignation, the facial hair as black as Danny's hair, rather like the curfew stubble Danny had a habit of growing, a shade too dark to be a five o' clock shadow. Phantom glare hollowed out and sharpened its features and Jack was struck again by the resemblance. His son had looked at Vlad that way before.

But that was impossible. A ghost. A human. How could they be so alike?

"We're not in the past anymore," Maddie announced. "This is Christmas present. The fire happened earlier, but Danny wasn't anywhere near here."

Jack relaxed; thankful his wife had interrupted—until the ghost replied.

"Of course he was."

Maddie bolted for the survivors, scanning the crowd for any familiarity. A scrap of black hair, a glimpse of pale, sharp cheek or the shade of blue Danny so preferred in his hoodies these days snapped their heads toward the individual like a cat focusing on a minute twitch of grass. One by one these people were dismissed—wrinkles their son had yet to develop, baby fat he'd already lost, a second chin he didn't have, paler hair, darker skin, softer nose than their precious boy.

Jack took another glance at Phantom—hair and eyes so painfully close, their features lining up like two copies of the same blueprint. If one was transparent and overlaid the other…

"Here! Over here Phantom!" someone shouted. Jack began following the ghost only to run into their guide, ice-cold eyes made even eerier with a knowing look. He shrunk away, paying attention to the survivors instead. The humans. Phantom couldn't possibly be their Danny. Danny was very much alive, Phantom was a ghost and even for him that was too far a leap to make. Jack shook his head. He couldn't imagine how a person could be alive and dead at once.

Yet while searching for his son, only Phantom consistently caught his attention.

The ghost nearly hit the ground, one survivor draped over its shoulder and back, two others in its arms whom it laid down gently near the ambulances. Carefully it slipped the third off its back and onto an open gurney. The Fentons stepped closer, phasing through the milling crowd packed around the accident. Their guide, all but forgotten, followed without care. Passing through a high school student filming the Christmas tragedy like a movie and Tucker, burdened beneath medical supplies, rushing for the nearest injured, they saw the three latest survivors. A glance was sufficient to tell them none were their Danny.

"Danny! Where's Danny!" Shouted Jack. The paramedics didn't respond. Beside him, Phantom struggled to its feet but Jack ignored him…it. That couldn't be Danny. The ghost was too much a glory hound anyway where his sweet son shied away from the spotlight.

"Jack, calm down. We need to find Danny and if he's not outside the building then he might…he might still be inside," Maddie finished in a whisper.

Fire-fighters had battled the flames all this time. With an army, half a dozen trucks and torrents of water—plus the minor contribution of Phantom's ice—they should have quenched it but heat proved stronger. Fire blazed unchecked, engulfing the apartment. Neither parent wanted to imagine Danny there, frightened and alone as smoke and flames consumed him. Their baby boy cries heartlessly unheard, no one to sooth his burns until he was silenced.

The fate of Tiny Tim leapt into their minds.

"What if he slowly chokes on the ash? What if he makes it out alive only to die later?" Maddie whispered.

"Maybe he's in that crowd," Jack said, pointing to the group milling about beside the survivors. News reporters blended with police officers, relatives, neighbors, friends of those who had once called the inferno home and simple busybodies looking for something interesting to watch. But none of these were Danny, nor those drawn forward like moths to stand and watch. Their son wasn't seen among those who have taken their time and money and few resources to deliver food and blankets and holiday treats among the survivors the fire fighters and Phantom kept plucking out of the building. Sam Manson was, but she could no more hear them than the children of Christmas past could.

Jack turned to the specter of Christmas Present who had been watching. "My boy, is he in the fire?"

"Now he is," said the ghost.

"Is he alive?" Maddie added with breathless fear.

To both parents the ghost appeared to consider the question for an eternity before answering. "For now the Great One lives."

Neither cared to check if the spirit was lying. Both parents knew the spirit of Christmas Past hadn't been lying. Their son had no time. They bolted for the building. For once Jack was able to match his wife's pace, worry for his boy giving his limbs the speed to keep up despite their shortness and the great girth they were forced to haul.

"We're spirits now, we should be able to rescue Danny without a problem," Jack said, but something about that statement nagged his mind. Jack had forgotten among the frantic search for his son he could feel the heat. Flames, even with safe distance between them, were uncomfortably hot, more so than the worst scorching sunlight but that was no longer enough to dissuade them when Danny was in such danger.

For the first time on this strange night, they could sense something with touch.

Jack still felt a trickle of fear in his mind, that the heat just might be too much, if their ghost forms could feel it. But his son was in there, the Christmas spook had confirmed it and he wasn't anywhere else. Jack had no choice. Side by side with his wife, teeth gritted, he charged a building turned hellmouth by flame.

Heat hit the ghost-hunting couple first: breath from a hot oven, suffocating warmth like the inside of a black car beneath the baking summer sun. Sweat beaded their brows in bullets. Once more fear condensed in his heart, but fear for his son. If this heat was terrible to them in the form of ghosts, how was their son still alive? Naked beams and furniture blazed with reds the color of blood, fiery oranges, golds, yellows but no living thing could be seen. Surely, with Phantom still plucking survivors from this hopeless wreckage, Danny could still be alive. That happy ending was not impossible. His precious Danno was not doomed to die because of whatever Scrooginess a ghost thought he possessed.

This was supposed to be Christmas.

Was it his imagination or had the heat grown even worse now that they were intangible and within the building proper? The power that allowed pieces of spine-shattering wood to fall harmlessly through them also allowed the heat to permeate into their very marrow without the slightest resistance from flesh or bone. Jack jerked hastily away from another tongue of flame reaching out to lick his flesh.

Too late, fire slithered beyond his hazmat suit, the fabric no barrier at all, and burrowed through the skin and the meat of his arm. The sensation was not like the pain he would have felt as a human. Had he been entirely human, he would have had a rather nasty burn against his skin, but a surface, first-degree burn. As a ghost, the scalding was far worse.

Fire scorched not only the nerves of his skin, but slithered deeper without the resistance of flesh like a white-hot parasite. Burning pain shot into his fat, his muscle, until the very tip of the flame brushed against bone.

"Ahh!" His hand clutched the wound. That had felt…like being burned for the first time all over again, the sensation a new, unfamiliar exquisite agony. His hand pressing against scalding pain offered no relief whatsoever and he had no ice to quench the sharp sensation. He stumbled back, shock clear on his face. How, when he was entirely intangible, when he shouldn't have nerves to speak of, could he feel this pain? How, when his body was removed from all things physical—if this was some ectoplasmic manifestation of his body while his real body slept in its proper time and place—could he still feel physical sensations.

And why did it have to be the worst of them!

Only all-consuming flames could be seen—not a scrap of black hair or blue hoodie—blazing talons burning Jack twice more before he found a relatively non-hellish patch of flooring to stand on. Wood groaned beneath his weight, so fragile even the touch of Jack's intangible weight could not be stood. Boards collapsed with a dying croak from beneath him and gravity regained its grasp. Jack's hands slid through the floor. In desperation he gripped newfound power within, floating to a stop and back out of the sudden, gaping hole. Staggering away, he grasped the knob of the nearest exit, fearing Danny was behind the door's wreath of flames.

"Jack!" shouted Maddie.

Ignoring the pain—which seared only his hand because the doorknob hadn't slid into meat and bones—he tried to wrench it open and stumbled right through. It came away behind him with a crunch of shattered wood and a sudden breath of flames.

No Danny. Nothing but fire. Jack's world twist slightly. Were they being tugged to another place by their spirit guide? Not now! They still had to find Danny. Who would save him if they didn't? Jack raised his head, or tried to. A thousand-pound barbell bore down on his bowed neck, forcing his head to the ground and his back to curve. His brain melted from the heat like the hard-drive of a computer. Jack turned his head slightly to the side, and saw Maddie clawing at a chair, struggling to stand. What was happening to them? They were spirits, surely nothing besides ecto-weaponry could harm them.

Except the heat. Most spirits didn't handle heat well. Copper, which ghosts used in their ectoplasm like iron in blood, worked better in cold. They were far more likely to find their son in death than in life. Would they even become ghosts or be obliterated completely. No one, not even Phantom, could perceive them and the ectoplasmic filth dragging them here shrank away from the flames as if they were repulsive, looking quite content to wait and watch them burn up. Ghosts really were evil.

Sweet, crisp, icy coldness hit Jack, more refreshing than the open doors of an air conditioned room turned up full blast during the hottest sunny summer day. Even his burns numbed over as the chill swept through him, marrow-deep, and flames vanished beneath frosty crystals. Phantom swept through, hands glowing blue while speaking into a small earpiece on the left side of its head.

"Right corner is clear. Yeah, I'll sweep the elevators." Phantom pulled its left hand away and flew—with less than its usual speed, though not as weary as it was after the ship, Jack noted—toward the elevator before vanishing, leaving the entire room engulfed in ice instead of fire.

Refreshing ice melted to water, but no fires sparked in the blackened room. Safe. Maddie and Jack relaxed. Something cracked. His wife leapt aside on instinct and a chunk of ceiling fell through them both. He bit back a maniac adrenaline-spawned laugh as Maddie gave him a wry smile. "Let's hope this never gets out at the ghost hunters' convention. Needing to be rescued by a ghost."

"I won't say anything if you won't," Jack said with a spark of humor. He needed that wit, that tiny spark of laughter in utter bleakness.

Still no sign of his son.

Yet, for some reason he wasn't as worried as he could have been. Should have been. He knew again with that insane instinct that made his mad inventions work: Danny was safe.

Above him the spirit materialized again, raised one brow and stared directly at him with a knowing look. And when a spirit that might well measure their existence in millennia (maybe even eons) gives a knowing look, anyone would turn away. Jack looked at the gaping, torn door—a mouth of pitch blackness in absence of fire far more comforting than those eyes.

"We still need to find Danny," he said.

With the fire smothered by Phantom's strange icy power Jack and Maddie didn't feel so leaden and the room was safe enough for both ghost hunters to search once more. The ability to pass through solid objects as though they were immaterial and to have those solid objects pass through them was once more invaluable. Phantom may have quenched the worst of the fire, and even used ice to bear the main support beams of the apartment, but many a block of ceiling or beam of wood broke off and crashed through them, sparing their lives. Doors no longer held the threat of fire, but were locked or the hinges and delicate inner workings melted or blocked off by beams or even whole upper floors fallen before them. The apartment had been rendered impassible to the living.

Yet for all their searching and newfound power not a trace of Danny could be found. Further in the stairs they heard a dull thud, followed by silence, followed by another thud like a heartbeat struggling for life. Rushing up they saw a withered, trembling hand gripping the cracked, creaking hand-rail, head bowed, half of one leg hanging limp, the other taking her full weight. But through the inferno she survived. Maybe their son had made it. Jack tried to give her a helping hand as she braced half her body on the rail before hopping up with one foot. His hand slid through her limp one. How did Phantom grab onto tangible objects? He had grabbed the doorknob. Another sound caught their attention and they raced through a broken pipe and a tiny table with five chairs crowded around it, all fallen and broken to see a young woman hauling a man, maybe her grandfather, toward the door. "Poco mas, poco mas," she kept chanting.

"Danny!" Maddie shouted. No one heard. When Jack tried to give this older man a hand his hand again fell through.

"Danno!" Jack jerking back. His insides felt like someone ripped them all out, shoved them in a blender and put it on pulverize before pouring them back in. A black-haired, blue eyed specter floated before him. A ghost. His heart felt cold. His son was a ghost? They'd failed? "Danno?"

Deaf, his undead son reached for the people. The young woman's hand smeared ash across his chest and Jack saw the infamous white symbol. Oh. His insides solidified again. Phantom. His heart slowed down. A moment later it lifted the two away.

"That wasn't Danny sweetie," Maddie soothed.

"I know, I just thought for a moment…"

They trembled in shared horror of the worst possible fear. Not only their son dead but a ghost, their enemy: unfeeling, unthinking, obsessed. A cruel mimicry of their beloved child to further rip out bloody chunks of their hearts. Forced to end the remnants of Danny for Amity's sake. "Let's not think about that. He's still alive," Maddie declared.

Jack pointedly did not meet their guide's stare. His son had to be alive.

They ran into others, still miraculously alive, and each person renewed their hope that somewhere, somehow Danny lived but the boy himself wasn't to be found. Both tried a few more times to help those they ran into but had to give it up as a bad job. They simply couldn't carry people as Phantom could. The ghost teen invariably found each of these people quickly enough to help them to safety, but the experience left Jack with a cold feeling in his stomach. What if they did find Danny but trapped or missing a leg or overcome with smoke? What help could they possibly be to him when they could not touch him and he couldn't sense them?

"You willingly blind yourself to the plight of your son." For the first time Jack heard a thread of emotion in the ghost's voice: confusion. "Do you not want to help him?"

"Of c—" Jack began.

"But you are unwilling to open your eyes and accept the truth for his sake," the ghost finished. "Accept him."

Jack's jaws clacked together. It was not the towering ghost that made him feel so small.

"Damn it, where is Danny!" Shouted Maddie.

The ghost turned to her, "And you do not yet see," the spirit grumbled. "Very well, there is more."

"But what about our son—" Maddie started before the burned, hollow building folded around them and unfolded into a different scene altogether.

Had Jack followed the dreams of his parents and become a plumber, spending his whole life enthralled with nothing more exciting than pipes and battling nothing more horrible than six feet of rotten meat clogging said pipes; had he been the utter definition of modern normalcy and believed in no afterlife at all he would still know the ghost zone when he saw it. The swirling green skies, the absence of gravity or solidarity, the often inverted colors of formally living beings, the occasional Chimera—all were subtle hints of the undead realm. Any fool would have known the emerald realm as the realm of ghosts, even if the word para-biology had never reached their ears.

"The Ghost Zone," Jack whispered. His words trivialized the infinite realms. To its breadth the whole Earth was but a tiny scrap of island. To its depth the ocean was a shallow puddle. Even a ghost could not exist long enough to explore every bit of their native realm. The Fentons had tried. With the help of their Fenton portal, they had even been able to glimpse it. However they had, to Jack's disappointment, preceded cautiously like scientists peering into the depths of the ocean. Never before had they immersed themselves within the Dead Sea.

Total immersion in the ghost zone was as different from peering through the portal as looking at the moon through a telescope compared to walking upon its surface. The ever-present doors hovered throughout this part of the Dead World in as different a pattern from the portal as stars might be when viewed from South America as opposed to Pluto. More worrisome, unlike the relative safety of the realm beyond their portal, dozens of ghosts floated here.

Armed.

"Hang on!" Phantom shouted, snagging one caped ghost on a piece of broken metal. Leaving the ghost struggling several yards off the ground like an insect with pinned wings, Phantom cleaved the next ghost in two with an icy sword. Another ghost instantly took its place, gripping in two tentacle-limbs where arms and hands should have been unknown instruments of vile appearance. The blades—and it was equipped with far too many of them in Jack's opinion—were coated in a nauseating combination of ectoplasm…and blood.

Other vile specters weren't targeting Phantom. Another—larger, fiercer and armed with more gruesome instruments—turned attention and deadly weapons upon a bundle of limbs. Children. Some were living, others dead, all a wild mixture of age from adulthood to infant. None, a great relief for Jack and Maddie, could possibly be mistaken for their son. The abomination of undeath stalked them.

Ghosts ranging from knights to torturers fell aside, frozen by ice, bound in ectoplasmic ropes or simply collapsed, bleeding from wounds, to expose Phantom. The ghost's near-black suit was torn in dozens of places and green streaked from the worst of its gashes and gouges. Ash-stained hair was matted with ghoulish blood: its own and other ghosts. Yet its hands and eyes glowed with such ferocity that the tentacle monstrosity shrank back, unwilling, despite the known aggressiveness of ghosts, to do battle. The ghostly teen flew between the children and their would-be murderers.

Sparing another glance at the children and the ghost between them and danger—Phantom would protect them, if only for its precious standing—Jack whirled upon their ghostly guide with all the grace of berserk bear. Though the spirit was twice his size in most every direction, the enraged husband snatched a handful of collar, gave it a vicious twist and a yank to drag the ghost to eye level and bellowed, "Enough! Where. Is. My. Son."

Though the spirit was bent nearly in two, and ought to have been choked, its tones came out unruffled. "You do not see your son."

The savage sound that reverberated through Maddie Fenton's throat could not be defined as a mere growl. No prehistoric predator could emulate the embodied primal frustration of a parent who would not hear the same trite answers one. More. TIME. "Then what are we supposed to see spirit! If you're treating us like Scrooge then tell us what we are supposed to see so that we may see it and get this pointlessness over with to find our son!"

The spirit gave a regretful sigh, "You will never see if I tell you. In this matter you must teach yourselves to believe." The wrath that hit Danny's parents like a lightning-bolt was as far beyond mere frustration as a berserker's rage was beyond a child's temper tantrum. The spirit's paws curled, fangs gritted as it appeared to hold back its own wrath. "Do not think I held less rage once I heard tell of Danny Phantom's capture, or listening to you now professing worry for your son but too fearful of the truth to confront it for his sake. The only thing stopping me from ripping apart your home to gift the Great One with his rightful freedom is the truth of Clockwork's words: such a rescue, however well intentioned, would be at best a temporary solution."

"Hah! You're just trying to trick us! Even if Phantom did save Danny it would only be to convince us to go along with his charade," Jack said.

"Obviously it is not enough for the Great One to sacrifice so much for all others. He was willing to die for you!"

"Lies! If we go along with its charade…" Maddie paused, her harsh voice softened with fear, "We're about the only ones left who will stand up to it. Even Red Huntress has allied with Phantom. It's only a matter of time before she…we're the last hold-outs. If we give in humanity is done. Phantom will be a tyrant. Total conquest! But why would you care ghost," she finished spitefully.

That great, yeti-like head inclined, conceding a point. "Harsh," An ear twitched, "But you have right to fear a ghost conquering the living." Its gaze hardened, "Yet your fear blinds you to your son's downfall."

Maddie let out some of her rage in a breath. "For our son," she conceded. Jack nodded in agreement. "For his sake alone we will consider your words ghost."

"Then we must leave. Danny Phantom knows the way out," the spirit gestured again to the battle.

Metal screeched against metal as Phantom parried a knight's strike. Its strokes were swift and sure, a greater skill than it had even a year ago. The knight was barely matching strokes when, with a stealthy hand, Amity's nuisance created another blade and stabbed the knight in the throat.

But the instant it did this, the other ghosts, held back by flashing blades, pounced. Phantom faced the horde, taking a deep breath.

What escaped its throat was no mere sound, not even a battle cry but something tangible and powerful enough to bowl over every remaining enemy. The nearest one collapsed, ectoplasm bursting from its eyes. Others dropped weapons, claws tearing at ears in a mimicry of pain.

The effort cost Phantom though. A flash of light appeared at its waist. "No," it hunched over and forced the light down, snatching a ghostly blade from the nearest defeated foe to block an ax. The creature's weapon swung wide with a furious shriek, giving Phantom a perfect opening but even as it stopped one ghost, more picked themselves up and a second struck at Amity's ghost.

Phantom split once more, the blade passing harmlessly. The duplicates turned back to back and the Fentons thought the battle would be over with. Spiky metal smashed into the duplicate's shoulder with a muffled crack. It fell weakened with a cry, mustered itself and struck back. Two more ghosts flanked it, harassing on either side with spears. The duplicate blocked one. The other drove cruelly into its torso. Flesh parted beneath a third strike and the copy's leg gave out; the ghost teen pressed bloody lips together and slashed at the striking mace. The sword shattered, the mace flung off-balance. Phantom charged the other ghost, striking with blinding green light.

The ghost was obliterated beneath the duplicate. The spectral teen stiffened as a spear-wielder thrust into its neck. The point poked out beneath its jaw. It managed three stuttering steps before falling to its knees. Still it reached out for an enemy until another spear thrust into its head.

The duplicate turned to liquid ectoplasm.

A sword clove through both their heads. The original Phantom blocked another strike. Without the duplicate one of the ghosts scored a gash from shoulder to hip. Twisting, the spear brushing its side, it thrust into the ghost. Bracing the weapon with one arm against its body, its other arm flung a ball of ectoplasm.

The pathetic ecto-flicker fizzled out, colliding with the breastplate of another ghost like a wet firecracker. Phantom said something decidedly not in the spirit of the holidays.

With renewed strength Phantom's enemies attacked. A descending ax was blocked by a sword. Flipping the ghost around, Phantom stabbed it, turned and sliced a spear in two. Emerald steel flashed, carving a line of pain down the ghost teen's leg. The spirit of Amity Park slammed a foot on the lowered sword, blocked another strike and slashed the throat of a third ghost. A swift thrust into the first attacker ended another enemy.

A blaze of angry orange hit Phantom in the back, in its wound. The scream chipped at even Jack's obliviousness and the large man flinched. Phantom tucked its head, its shoulder, trying to roll out of the fall like a martial artist but exhaustion made the move clumsy and the former public enemy fell to its back with a hiss of pain. The remaining ghosts pounced like starving wolves.

Reflexes, ingrained after thousands of battles, drove Phantom to dodge but at last the specter's body failed. Though it tried, wrenching torn, savaged muscles to escape, it only flopped. The ghosts pinned all four limbs and fell upon Amity's ghost with talons and teeth.

Phantom could hardly be seen. Green blood flowed freely and the Fentons watched with sick fascination as scientists might watch a moose devoured by wolves.

"Get off!"

Accompanied by a blinding bomb of light the ghosts were forced to obey. Phantom took out a ghost with a stab. The other two, seeing Amity's guardian climb to its feet, finally fled for their afterlives, leaving it victorious. As always. The ghost stood tall and proud and stern; glowing with ferocity, blood smeared on glowering features lending it further savagery, an ectoplasm-stained sword in one hand.

The image broke as Phantom fell to its knees once more, gnashing its teeth; in too much pain to stop a scream, yet did not dare let loose a whimper for fear of alerting the wolves. For several minutes more it crouched, trembling, neither falling nor standing.

Other ghosts—or what had been ghosts—were strewn around the area, some torturers, others knights or even priests. Phantom did not give them a glance as it staggered to its feet, passing the fallen like a zombie. Limping toward the children it was more the ghost as they had seen it stumbling out of the portal. More than mere ectoplasmic wounds wearied it; more than the loss of bright green fluid slowed and staggered its steps; more than remembered pain cautioned its movements.

"It's okay…I'll get you all home."

Phantom strained for the heroic tone it usually spoke with—and utterly failed to hide how pained and exhausted it was.

The children followed anyway with the terrible blind trust children had for the ghost these days. But though the ghost boy carefully and faithfully delivered every child back to her or his home, the Fentons still couldn't see Danny, not among the children delivered or those who received the children. Their keen eyes searched every passerby and bystander for a glimpse of their son. Every head of black hair made their hearts leap with hope and every sight of a narrower face, or wrinkles, or a beard or chubby cheeks or dark eyes or any un-Danny feature felled their hearts once more. The closest match was exhausted Phantom. The simple act of seeing the children home safely seemed to sap whatever strength it had. When the last child had been safely deposited and the last door closed strength left Phantom. The ghost collapsed, hitting the concrete with sharp cracks, arms jutting out to catch himself, and finally its head hung with the bowed fatigue of a dog dying doing its work.

For a few moments the ghost didn't move and despite himself, Jack wondered if it was dead—an utterly idiotic idea. Then its head nudged the ground. Its face rolled, propping up a bruised, bloody chin. Lids lifted as it dragged both hands to its chest and pressed on the ground, getting to its knees. White knuckled fingers grasped a nearby parked car and with the support of steel the ghost straightened its spine. With quick, painful tries, several of them in succession, it finally rose again to and stepped away. Swaying like a tree caught in a storm, stumbling as if both legs were broken, the ghost staggered back to a portal.

There, Phantom came face to face with a monster.

The Fentons yelled from sheer, unexpected, shocked surprise. Yet not even Jack could honestly say only the alien visage of the creature prompted such sound from his throat. This specter was like no ghost they had ever set eyes on before—though in deathly aura it bore an uneasy resemblance to a certain ghost-of-a-former-partner. Usually ghosts were blobs of ectoplasm shaped like blobs or recognizable things: humans, dogs, even dragons.

One of the monster's heads was fanged like a sabertooth cat, but more like swords than teeth. Another's beak curved raptor-like, the edge broken with a jaggedness no beak of earthly origin could lay claim to. Something had taken all the fangs and claws, tentacles and pincers and everything spawned from the nightmares of humans and managed to sew them all together in the most ghastly of ways. Ghostly energy twisted living creatures in horrific, monstrosities but this ghoul had its own ectoplasm further twisted into something worse than a mere ghost.

Phantom stood before it on shaky legs. Jack hadn't been the most observant of people and no one could be less empathetic toward ghosts than he but a tiny twinge of pity twitched his heart. The sight of that pitiful figure facing such a monster would have coaxed a tear of blood out of the stoniest heart.

"It's just a trick," Maddie said automatically, then reluctantly added, "I think."

Jack couldn't manage more than a strangled sound and glanced at their guide, who watched the battle with the pained expression of a parent watching their child leave for the military. "So much weight on such young shoulders." Amity's protector was armed with a sword taken from one of the knights, but adrenaline alone fueled its attacks and defense and this creature was tougher and crueler than most ghosts. "Now come, my time dies," the spirit tugged them onward, away from the scene of Phantom landing a last desperate blow, collapsing alongside the monster it had beaten. The green world about them abruptly warped and parted briefly to give the onlooker a glimpse of the real world. To this glimpse the beaten, broken ghost boy dragged himself desperately.

And beyond there, fell at the feet of ghost hunters. "Damned luck," Jack commented with a grimace.

Time itself warped around them; the pair saw glimpses of events, the figures oddly distorted or sharply cut off as if the scene had been folded over. Their guide gestured to this strange other-worldly visage and once more the world unfolded around a peak into reality.

All three stumbled into the Fenton Lab.

Phantom's gloves had been stained with ash and smoke, fire and blood and ectoplasm. Streaks of filth marred harsh metal but the stains were too deep for pristine white to shine through. Amid dark colors and darker soot were blackened burns on the ghost's finger-tips. The ecto-proof glass seared each sensitive pad, yet it did not pause or stop its desperate, futile clawing motions at the transparent surface. How it was no longer encumbered by handcuffs Jack hadn't a clue, for the hand-cuffs lay completely unbroken upon the floor. Its ankles were still shackled to one another and he was satisfied the ghost was still imprisoned. A closer look showed its thumbs hung oddly and mis-shapen. Were they broken? But ghosts had no bones to break.

Didn't they?

Two clean streaks of pale skin ran starkly down sooty, green-stained cheeks, like clear rivers carving trenches through mud. Peering at the scratches in the glass walls of the cage, Jack could see these weren't the result of wild clawing, but of deliberate action. The furrows in the material were deep and obvious; the result of many pained hours of work and taken together the scratches formed letters. A precious few words done in a very messy hand, a small child's attempt to write for the first time—or from one blindfolded and desperate. Unfortunately they could understand nothing of the words written so painstakingly.

"What will happen to him?" Jack finally asked, staring at the pitiful figure. Phantom's wounds still wept. He knelt in a pool of his own ectoplasm.

"The future is a tricky thing to scry, however a metal table dyed green I see lying and an abandoned Fenton thermos with no owner. If these events remain unchanged…Phantom will die," the ghost said wearily.

Jack was about to protest that ghosts were already dead when their guide finished.

"—and so will your son."

With that, they rose back up to the first floor, to the living room couch. This time when the Fentons burst awake they glanced between the lab and Danny's room, but ran upstairs. Again they charged into the pitiful room. Blankets and sheets were rumpled and tossed slightly aside as though their owner had only left for a moment to stumble into the kitchen for a drink of water. Not a sign remained of their own frantic search, though they both remembered ripping the room apart looking for their son. This mess gave the impression Danny might come back any second, sleepy and stumbling to the warmth of his bed.

The seconds turned to minutes turned to eons and Danny did not come.


	4. The Third

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Several people have mentioned the Fentons' obliviousness. To the their credit the idea of a ghost and a living, breathing human being one and the same is a few miles beyond the realm of impossible. Besides, parents have been similarly oblivious in real life. I'm sure you guys can think of a few examples!

"Is this all some crazy dream?" Jack whispered, "Are we even awake now?"

"No and yes."

The floating figure looming before them spoke in a tone like Sweeney Todd's shaving blades. A pitch that slid into their brains, ghosted over primal terror and whispered 'beware' into twitchy ears. The first ghost had spoken with the voice of eternal patience and the second's tone had been caring even in the storm of its wrath but this wraith more than any other made them feel as rabbits before a cat.

This ghost of Christmas Yet To Come was shrouded in thick black cloth so deep no other color could be seen. A hood masked most of the face, save for a glimpse of flickering white fire curling like a tongue about it's throat. Jack's burn twitched with phantom pain. Power emanated from it, far vaster and colder than any ghost they had ever faced before. Phantom held power, yes, but his power was hidden, muted for lack of a better word by a teenage form. Even Vlad's spirit—or the shape-shifter—was not so terrible in his power. He had been death, but the victim of death, not the power of death. Here was the power of Time at its most dreadful, it's most awful: its last. The power of time run out.

None of the other Christmas spirits had such an expression on their faces. If madness could be a color, it would take the color of those glittering white teeth beneath that black hood. If all the insanity in the world could be condensed into one thing, it would be the unholy grin on this ghost's face.

The Fentons backed away. The smile widened.

Heavily gloved hands—what form the specter's hands took beneath was a question they could happily leave unanswered—seized their own in an undeniable grip and once more the world warped around them. This journey passed entirely without a sense of movement, akin to that one amusement park space ride Danny had loved so much. The one simulating a space-ship flying to Mars. They felt a sensation of stomach-hurtling rapid movement, but their feet stayed firmly planted to the floor as time alone sped up. This new reality re-worked around them was still their son's room.

It was hardly recognizable.

Two frantic parents, spurred by adrenaline and threat upon their son's life, could not have torn apart the room so. Such damage had been cosmetic compared to the devastation now. A hundred equally desperate people had torn through the same place with less consideration than the two Fentons. Bookshelves, drawers, the bed and every conceivable hiding place a teenager could think of had been utterly gutted, broken apart and what remained of the wood was splinters. A few sad schoolbook covers lay open and barren of pages like gutted corpses. Broken CD's lay forgotten on the floor. His computer was long ago gone, not even leaving a dusty indention to betray its former presence. Nor a desk to leave a dusty indention on, though a few wood splinters and nails remained to hint at the furniture's destruction. Sheets, blankets and even the bed itself had been picked over until there were naught but hard, coiled metal springs. Most of these had been clipped and taken; the remainder stood like a few proud trees against loggers.

Yet those damages could not compare to the worst of the room's destruction. Here and there were bits and pieces broken or warped of wood and metal hanging where one wall used to be. The former ceiling now had a lovely skylight, which would have been lovelier if the light shining through it had been a little less blood-red.

"They even took the UFO," the spirit grumbled in a shockingly Danny-ish expression, tugging at a bit of fishing line where a model space ship once hung. Maddie shot it a glance, heart paralyzed with horrified suspicion.

For Danny she gathered her courage. If their first spirit was really Vlad, could this poor ghost be the last remains of her son. "Are you my son?"

"Only a matter of time before you figured that one out dear," it's glee faded to titanic displeasure.

"How can you be my son? He sounds nothing like you," Maddie asked.

"Perhaps I'm only saying all the things your son never had the guts to say. Believe me, he's wanted to do this so badly."

"Are you…our son?" Jack asked.

"Yes and no."

Maddie let out a frustrated noise. This ghost couldn't be entirely her son; at his worst Danny never made her want to break her own clenched teeth. She whipped around, kicking aside a useless curtain torn to rags—only for her foot to phase through—and stomped across carpet colored and textured like a science experiment kept long past the expiration date.

Four indents, like tiny graves, half-filled with dust in the rotted carpet told where the bed had lain. The door was missing in action, along with the doorway and a foot or so of the bordering wall. The few support beams remaining after the pillage groaned ominously beneath their load. Worriedly the couple stared at the remnants of the ceiling, but it barely had enough material left to shield from weather. Possibly, as usual for their spirit forms, they could feel nothing of the temperature. Had they been human, the stench of rot would have been unbearable.

The couple avoided a hole gaping in the floor by the new doorway—some new terrible ghost…or perhaps some new terrible weapon?—and stepped into the hall.

The rest of Fentonworks fared no better. Walls had holes blasted out of them here and there, the remnants rotting apart. Winds, rain, snow and ice had eagerly pounced into the abandoned house as though seeking shelter. No human sign lingered less than years old. Furniture was gone or destroyed, the few remaining Christmas lights hung limply; dark, green plastic ghosts broken, wires bare and almost black with rust like pieces of old fencing than festive decorations.

Jack and Maddie stepped around the pit where their lab had once been. The bottom was filled with brackish water and the Fentons doubted anything was left. Phantom must have escaped, tearing apart their lab in the process. Maddie couldn't bring herself to hate him for that though. Not with what they had planned. Beyond the crater of a basement they could see the ops center, or what was left of it, collapsed in the front yard and reduced to scrap metal like a carcass picked over by vultures. Beyond metal ribs they glimpsed the rest of the town.

Where their neighbor's house had been was a trench of annihilation carving a trail of splinters and shredded roofs where homes used to be, as though a particularly vengeful tornado descended to vent it's wrath. Had that Vortex ghost slashed such a path through the urban jungle, wrecking havoc in retribution for it's former servitude?

Urban jungle Amity Park truly was. Vines and trees and a great many plants sprouted over up-turned tanks and abandoned buildings groaning beneath their weight. Streets were barely recognizable beneath gouges taken from them and toppled buildings piled upon them, all layered with bramble and bush and unnaturally giant trees. Cars and helicopters and even fighter jets lay like downed animals over the remnants of Amity Park and atop all these weeds, shrubs and grasses broke through metal, split the asphalt and cracked the great slabs of civilization into so many tiny pieces. Nature had taken back what humans had stolen from her.

Death had taken over life.

Their city was overgrown with the greenery, which failed in any way to be reassuring. Leaves and vines alike glowed too brilliantly green, or worse purple, the flowers produced too brightly colored and Maddie could swear they were surrounded by a ghostly aura. The overall effect, rather than showing the beauty of life, only seemed a monument to the triumph of death. A hint of the ghost zone infecting the living all covering a still more horrifying truth:

Amity Park was a war zone.

On the losing side.

"Welcome, to the glorious future," Their guide deadpanned, its expression showing no mirth.

Though confident now in their intangibility and invisibility within other times, Maddie and Jack still stepped and poked around the place with caution. Neither wanted to disturb anything, not for fear of causing some wreckage to tumble down on them—they were some form of spirit and held no fear of that—but for fear of unearthing some ghastly bones. The deathly wasteland, the barren, decrepit state of their dying house heralded only worse for their children. Danny and Jazz were probably…not around anymore. Neither dared do anything to uncover irrefutable proof of their children's' deaths, though they both had the leaden-cold suspicion that none of their family had survived.

Or worse, maybe the Fenton family was still out there, but in what state? Maddie could almost imagine Jazz, hair cropped short, dressed all in armor, eyes dead after all she had gone through. More readily she could imagine Danny in such a role—if he somehow survived. Over the last couple years or so she got the subtle impression her son was tougher than he looked. She still didn't want to imagine him grown up in this terrible future. Was he hammered into a grizzled, scarred, battle-hardened warrior? Drained to a mere skeleton of a human being, digging for food like a rat?

Or was he as this ghost said: here.

"What can we do to prevent this?" Maddie asked in a hushed voice. She did not dare ask where Phantom was.

"First you take a good look at the future you made," their guide accused, sweeping a clawed hand over the devastation.

What had happened here? The Fentons thought as they slipped through with careful steps over what had once been their driveway, now a collapsed, overgrown tank. Had Pariah Dark returned? Had the ghosts banded together to take Amity, overwhelming even its so-called protector? Or had their worst fears been realized: Phantom dropping his hero persona to unveil the hidden monster within?

They must have said the last question aloud. "You really think Phantom had something to do with this?" The spirit of Christmas Yet to Come glared in lieu of an eye-roll. "No, the little bastard promised never to harm his beloved town…no matter how many times it's stupid people kicked him to the curb. If you want to know who is responsible look in the mirror."

"Then who?" asked Maddie.

The ghost sneered, "Certainly not the brave and heroic ghost hunters who did something as stupid as capture and vivisect and murder the only ghost capable and willing to stop all this." The Fentons said nothing. "You could say my other half had a hand in this, but you made all this disaster and ruin possible," its expression turned blank, "And this isn't the only future you've ruined."

"But we can change this?" Jack asked hopefully.

"If Clockwork's stupid plan works out," the ghost gave them another macabre smirk, "I've got my doubts. You've had chances on chances to change but look at you: seeing ghosts as evil until the day you die…and beyond."

"You aren't convincing us of the supposed morality of spirits," Maddie snapped. "The other two spirits might have been…they were helpful," she admitted.

"Ask Phantom if you want helpful…oh wait? You can't. I'm not wasting my only taste of freedom being moral enough to convince a pair of ectophobic deluded obsessed slabs of meat to treat me like a person."

"..."

"Then why help out at all? Why show us this?" Jack asked.

"Besides the freedom? Even for me this future has no happy ending. I'm not around. One of my selves is dead, thank you for that, and the other is going to die so depressingly remorseful its sickening." The disgusted face split into a shark-like smile, "And you're both going to be miserable. I can't miss out on the opportunity I never had the guts to take in life." 

They dared not ask what had all this to do with their son's disappearance, or worse, their son's disappearance to do with all this. Each hunter quickened the pace, their feet passed through the unstable rubble and slippery slush as though it was not there. Yet even their swiftness brought into sight not a single person or thing. Not even the marauding birds or scavenging squirrels. Not even a rat, though they appeared to survive all else.

At least, not any living ones.

Suddenly their guide hovered before them; harsh leather gloves clamped down on their arms and the ghost dragged them upwards. The desolate remains of Amity Park were swallowed in indistinct greenery, then an overlaying fog granted an unnatural glow. Beyond the destruction, at the edges of the strange, ghostly plants, signs of inhabitance could be picked out with sharp eyes. Where forests and farmland had been fresh signs of humanity could be seen.

That was almost worse.

Upon these fringes of former forest and farmland ramshackle homes had been put together from the refuse of the former city. Cardboard boxes were the best of available homes and these inhabitants reflected their new homes. Eyes shrunken in pits of sockets stared unseeing at the trio of spirits, bones protruded from gaunt faces, paper-thin skin shifting around skulls. The survivors took feeble, hesitant steps from their homes. Twitchy limbs and too-wide eyes spoke of long years existing in terror. Humans moved like rats, shoulders hunched inward, cringing from the sky, flinching from any strange glow and doing their best to blend with whatever cover was available.

"Beware!" a figure suddenly swooped overhead, a ghost. As though by magic humans vanished in every nearby nook and cranny like cockroaches from a sudden switch of light. Maddie and Jack stared at the ghost, then the places where humans crept seconds before with no small amount of confusion. A second look at the specter as it flew over the fringes confirmed only the box-obsessed ghost. The blue-overalled idiot had never really been a threat. Oh he was mildly disorienting to anyone new to town, but Amity Park residents had grown so used to him as to see him as either a pest akin to a mouse or an easily manipulated, free worker. Certainly the ghost had never inspired this level of fear to the point of deserted streets.

Well...deserted trails anyway.

Their guide tugged them onward, bringing their attention beyond Amity Park.

Overgrown destruction spread everywhere; not a single road or building or structure built by human hands was left standing or intact. In the present ghosts rarely dared set a ghostly tail beyond the borders of Amity. Why was unknown, but in this future they had and humanity paid dearly for it. Chicago was recognizable only by its position next to Lake Michigan. The metropolis a landfill for ancient buildings and these were slowly swallowed into the swamp the city had been built over. Amid trashed buildings floated pitiless ghosts the likes of which the pair had never seen before. Wraiths terrified, destroyed, maimed and killed with impiety. The remnants of humans with all compassion and goodness flayed from their tattered souls. Before their very eyes one such ghost reached into a human, gripped the heart and simply pulled, ripping the vital organ free and forcing the living person to collapse into a boneless sack of meat. Its clawed hand squeezed and the heart stilled, life-blood oozing out between fingers alongside pulped flesh. The ghost continued squeezing and rubbing the glob like a child with a much-loved doll.

Small towns and once great and glorious cities alike had been battered and broken like their inhabitants. Blood stained far too many streets and buildings, old and dark and caked in too many layers for either of their comfort. Rotting corpses had been left out for the crows. Most were long picked over, others buzzing with flies. No one dared reveal themselves long enough to hold a funeral, or even a burial.

No sign of Phantom, either as ruler or destroyed.

At last their guide floated back to the ground and released his terrible grip. Hundreds of miles had been covered, yet the Fentons did not even have to massage feeling back into their limbs. Immediately they knew why their guide had chosen to bring them here. Rising before them was an oddity in this post-apocalyptic future: a building entirely untouched by the destruction and devastation that swept the country.

They were not in any way reassured.

The construction was a monument to imposition, designed specifically to intimidate any daring visitor to ant-like stature. In this it succeeded beyond all expectations. Though the material was modern, whoever built it had a castle in mind. If ever a dictator's home had been built, this was undoubtedly it. No gardens or fountains of water or white marble broke up or softened the foreboding appearance of stone and metal. Hovering above and around the building were ghosts, green-glowing and equally ominous like terrible gargoyles in the armor and stance of guards.

Against these ghosts Maddie and Jack passed undetectable as ever, for no guard looked their way, or eyed their spectral guide as it passed, just as Phantom had not. The Fentons walked cautiously, shoulders hunched against discovery, without exposure toward massive, metallic doors. These doors were heavy and thick as safe doors, yet wider and taller than any castle door with such fortitude that should the whole world crumble, they would still stand. They laid cleverly upon their hinges. At a simple nudge they could be swung open as one tiny busy-body of a ghost did so, yet such was their weight that machinery or a dozen of the strongest ghosts must have had to lower them into place.

Through the towering doorway they stepped into hallways with the appearance of deliberate enlargement for terrorizing in a manner any ruler would envy. Maddie felt like Susie in Calvin and Hobbs on her way to the principal's office. Here there were some signs of humanity—paintings, carvings and mosaics decorated floors, walls, ceilings and windows, though this art inspired no hope within the couple. A central theme was prevalent in every statue and stained glass window: Conquest. Ghosts overthrowing human leaders, ghost armies marching through cities and trampling over human resistance were ghastly depicted in every brush stroke and hue of color. And over all the other ghosts, depicted again and again was the same ghost with a ring, a scepter and a crown.

"That's not Phantom," said Jack, "That looks like the Wisconsin ghost."

Uneasiness crawled like a thousand tiny ticks beneath her skin as cold red eyes met hers, though they were but glass. Thus far no shade of the past, no ghost of the present, no Phantom of the future had seen them but the stained-window articulation of the Wisconsin ghost appeared to be the exception. Those eyes were so alike to their guide's in form, differed only by white and pupil as they stared right through her spiritual form, burning bare flesh despite the cover of her hazmat suit.

Maddie would not admit it aloud but no other ghost made the hairs on the back of her neck stand rigid with wariness, made every muscle tense to fight, made her teeth clench like this one. All ghosts had obsessions and the ghost huntress recently gained the disturbing belief that she was its ghostly obsession. Or worse, Danny. Regardless of her discomfort, if her suspicions were correct, this ghost was a key to preventing this hellish future. They had to move deeper.

Her attention was ripped back to the future when the hallway opened into a throne room so grandiosely massive it dwarfed the dauntingly enormous hall as the ocean dwarfs the largest river. The ceiling must have been a hundred feet off the ground, though it was impossible to tell, the walls hundreds of feet apart from each other and the whole vast space was packed with ghosts and humans alike shoulder to shoulder, standing in rows like sardines or hovering above each others' heads. Yet the monstrous space only miniaturized them rather than becoming smaller with clutter. Atop a dais stood a throne of reasonably tasteful if redundant decoration. Perched upon velvet cushions was the ghost depicted in so much art. Though it looked even less human than before: the glow of its eyes brighter, the fangs longer, the hair occasionally flickering as though shifted to flame. Its normal white and red clothes had been transformed to royal clothes, though obviously modeled after a businessman's attire. The green crown, once the Ghost King's, burned on its brow with a darker fire than on Pariah's.

"Jack. Maddie."

The couple crouched into defensive stances at the otherworldly echoing voice, fearing discovery at last, but the ghost's eerie stare wasn't in their direction and neither were any other spectral eyes, save their guide's. The ominous spirit urged them forward, through the crowd.

"Goddamn!" whispered Jack when they stumbled to the front.

The Fentons had known, in an intellectual way, they were traveling through time. Their childish guide confirmed their presence in the past; they knew they were in the present with the mammoth bestial ghost; their fiery-haired guide had announced their arrival to the future. Yet before they had only seen the past and present versions of Phantom and occasionally other, inconsequential individuals. Strangers. People he hadn't known or had only barely been familiar with. Now, for the first time, they set eyes upon familiar features. However much they did not want it to be, Jack and Maddie could not help but see the similarities. Despite the shocking differences between them, they recognized all too well their own visages.

The Wisconsin Ghost had not discovered them, had not been talking to them. It had addressed people in the future, who had managed to survive, as impossible as the sight was. Maddie's jaw hung loose at the sight of herself—her future self—however impossible the sight appeared to be. For staring through her own eyes upon herself was akin to a dream, or a stranger distortion upon reality. Yet could these people possibly be themselves?

The other Jack was more difficult to recognize beneath folds of skin hanging limp like over-sized clothes over a frame as emaciated as any survivor. Lacerations and sores poured blood and puss all over the scarred, bloody, dirty, bruised skin worn nearly transparent from fighting a losing war. Those rags might have been salvaged from a landfill. Looking at the face of his future self, Jack knew with terrible certainty his very soul was not untouched by the ravages of time. Laugh lines had been worn from his face like the rough features from a stone stuck against the onslaught of rapids. Deep frown lines had replaced them, carved from despair and death and the harsh, horrible life awaiting present-Jack. Wrinkles deepened with centuries of age pressed in short years and lack of nourishment. Those intense eyes were fixed with a fury and focus most did not realize Jack could possess, and fixed firmly on the Wisconsin ghost. He struggled with every bit of strength left to get to his feet, despite the ghost warriors pushing him down to the floor.

"Vlad…the ghost who came to warn us…he's from this future." The instant the conclusion left his lips, Jack knew it to be true.

"Bingo, though a little further along." Their guide confirmed. "Now on with the inevitable."

As sharply as the future Jack contrasted with his happy-go-lucky past self, so did the future Maddie with her emaciated husband. Her body showed only faint signs of enduring her husband's treatment. The scars this brutal future left on her, even the scars of present and past had been subjected to cutting edge medical treatment, leaving behind only a few faint white lines. The blood and dirt caking her like Jack had been meticulously scrubbed away, her skin and body revitalized with the greatest of care to remove it from the horror of this reality. Not a strand of gray stained her shining chestnut hair and present day Maddie had to tug her own hair in order to confirm the presence of a few marring streaks.

Jack might have been dressed in clothes an escaped prisoner, homeless for years, would have snubbed a nose at but this future Maddie was the opposite. The garments clinging to her body were of only the finest silks and satin, cut and fitted by the finest tailor to emphasize her features perfectly. Yet they were not clothes she would ever willingly don herself, at least not in front of ghosts. The fabric provided no protection against an ectoplasmic blow or even cold, was sheer in many places and designed to cover as little as possible. Yet the expression upon her face was an equally sharp contrast with the seductive clothing. Lines drawn harshly in a snarl, teeth bared, lips bloodless in a sneer of utter contempt, eyes narrowed around scars of bitter loathing for every ghost she faced, especially the one on the throne.

"Going to finish us off Vlad?" future Jack spat fearlessly.

"Vlad?" Past Jack whispered.

"The Wisconsin Ghost also called itself Vlad Plasmius honey," Maddie whispered.

"Oh, right."

The Wisconsin ghost chuckled, "I do not need to kill you. Indeed that would be too swift, too merciful a fate. I have merely brought you, my dear friends to my seat of power—"

"We're no friends of yours," interrupted other Maddie.

"But how can you not be when you, in your greatest and most terrible failure have granted me my greatest and most terrible triumph," said the ghost ominously.

"Granted what? We've fought you tooth and nail!" said other Jack.

"Ah but you have rid me of my one true nemesis," Vlad reminisced as he stood, pacing toward them. "The only one with the power to possibly defeat me, much as it galls to say so. The only other contender for the crown. Phantom was young yes, but he had so much power, so much potential and he alone could have stopped this." Something like regret flickered through Vlad's eyes. "He would have been a great prince, a great heir," a forlorn sigh, "But of course he would have refused. Just as he refused apprenticeship." Voice raising again, the Wisconsin Ghost continued, "Certainly I wouldn't have been able to rise to the lofty height of world ruler had he still been here to fight against me. I owe my triumph to the two of you, who cut him apart on Christmas of all times! And gave me my greatest Christmas present at last." Plasmius focused on Maddie, "Exactly what I wanted all along." He paused and glanced to the side where no one stood. "…Almost."

"Phantom wouldn't be any better a dictator than you," growled other Maddie.

"He wouldn't have been a dictator at all my dear," the Wisconsin ghost shook his head as a displeased parent would to a child who never stopped sneaking cookies. "Fool as always, he had wanted nothing more than to help the ungrateful masses."

"He's an evil, wicked ghost," shouted other Jack. Present-day Maddie shifted awkwardly as if a friend had made a very racist comment in her hearing.

The Wisconsin ghost smirked horribly at other Jack, "Oh my, and you still don't know. He never got the chance to tell you did he? You gagged him before he could say a word?"

"What are you talking about?" Other Jack asked in an ironic echo of his past self.

"Surely it's obvious even a fool like yourself can figure it out: Danny Phantom, Danny Fenton. Surely white hair and glowing green eyes didn't disguise your own son from you?"

"He's not our son!" four voices shouted in concert.

The response had come automatically for the present-day Maddie, yet the words came weakly as pieces of a disquieting puzzle began to condense just outside of her reach. This strange Dickens-obsessed ghost had always insisted that her son was in danger, but she couldn't find him, had not even seen him. Had only seen Phantom. All three spirits swore to show her Danny and took her to Phantom time and time again. They said she needed to figure it out for herself, needed to see...

No.

Fenton? Phantom? The same being? "Is it possible?" Maddie whispered. No, it couldn't be. Her son ate, slept, drank, got sick, all human things, all signs of life. Yet her mind wouldn't dismiss the sickening conclusion. "But he would have to be living and dead at the same time?"

It shouldn't be. Couldn't be. Ectoplasm and living flesh didn't mix any better than water and oil…but those substances could mix, with enough electricity.

Jack, displaying the occasional spousal ability to read minds, shook his head, "No. The electricity necessary would immediately stop the heart. The ectoplasmic construct would only be possessing a corpse." He twitched, imagining such a thing.

Jack's mind was not so rational as to piece puzzles together or follow a trail to a conclusion; he could not have invented a fraction of what he did if his mind worked in such an ordinary, ordered way. Conclusions seemed to leap in his head and he figured out from them the ways to work them in reality. The scientific method was backwards for him, yet he was, at times, startlingly accurate. Maddie often came to rely on this odd gut instinct, which was why she turned to her husband to ask what was and was not impossible.

"Could ectoplasm, bound to flesh on a molecular level, preserve a corpse?" Maddie asked fearfully. "Well enough to have the facsimile of life?"

Jack considered Phantom, hair stained black, eyes blazing blue with icy power, so exactly like Danny who was in danger, in trouble because…

"Corpses can't have growth spurts. Your theory isn't possible," Jack shook his head. Their guide chuckled.

The vampiric ghost interrupted their thoughts: "Or perhaps your mind can't come to the appropriate conclusion, trapped in denial that you tortured your own son to death." The last word escaped in a snarl made more terrifying with fangs. Now the Wisconsin ghost stalked toward them like a predator, fury roiling in red eyes.

Yet Maddie had the disquieting thought that they were close to the terrible truth. "It's lying." Maddie whispered like a drowning victim grasping for a line. "It's a ghost. The Wisconsin ghost. It's lying." Her voice became firmer. Even among filthy lying ghosts the Wisconsin Ghost was particularly well-distinguished for its distaste in truth.

A ring of darkness appeared around its waist, though it did not pause or falter in approach. The blackness into two and slid over its body, transforming in wake the familiar ghost form to an even more familiar human form.

"Vladdie?" both Jacks whispered uncomprehendingly. The older Jack went ash white as some horrific conclusion struck his heart, something the younger Jack was thankful not to comprehend. He was too busy dealing with his mental blue screen of death because that last action did not compute.

"Your son Danny is dead." Vlad announced, voice colder in human form, eyes like ice. "He died by the hands of his own parents, who captured him when he was already sorely wounded, who let him bleed out onto the floor like a lab-rat. And who murdered him with vivisection on their own table! With his death the one individual who might have been able to equal my power was killed…whom I have not been able to kill and so I came to rule."

Belief came, slowly, horrifically dawning upon their future selves features. When nothing else, not the destruction of their home or the deaths of their children or the rule of ghosts could break them, this did. Shattering started in their eyes, which grew dull and glazed, and spread out over their faces, rendering them slack and trembling as it passed. Sucking away life to turn them into living ghosts with hellish despair.

"No!" younger Maddie shouted. "It's just a trick! Don't give in! Plasmius is a liar!" But the shades of the future yet to be could not hear this echo from the past.

Their ominous guide grabbed Maddie and Jack just as their counterparts let loose their first sounds of utter despair and grief. "Interesting as this is, we have other places to be."

Present Jack's mind re-booted. "What if he isn't lying?"

"Congratulations, the impossible has happened. Jack Fenton's brain cells started working. But before we get to the main event, we need to visit another time."

Time flew, or maybe they did. When the world once more slowed to reality the wasteland Maddie saw made the former war-zone Amity Park look like a golden age.

The Fentons had been flung onto a world of death. Stretched before them, like the seas of the past, was a desert of ash, harsh and gray and utterly light-sucking. The sun shone blood-red upon blackened, skeletal trees, what few were left standing in the barren waste. No shelter could be seen, no life beneath the haze of fog—or was that smoke?—no death either. The only sign of any ghost was the Christmas specter who had taken them to this desolate place, which she supposed was another Christmas.

Though how could it be Christmas without anyone to celebrate?

"What happened!" Jack asked.

"Nukes. Humans overthrowing the rule of Vlad Plasmius with a bang," The ghost smirked its own joke. "You say we ghosts are destructive but this," the ghost shook his head admiringly, then grimaced, "Not as fun though. Everything all wiped out at once. This is Amity Crater now."

"How can you say that?" Jack gasped.

"Sadist," the ghost said, with an appropriate Joker smile. "Come on, not all ghosts are fluffy little forgiving angels like dear Phantom." The expression died. Its undead corpse rose. "Some of us actually know how to carry a grudge."

"What did we ever do to you?" Maddie protested.

The ghost's full attention focused on them like a tornado. No smile split the darkness. For once their guide was expressionless. "Only everything. Really, you killed me, twice technically," Feeling crept into his words. "You…broke my heart—three times over if you can imagine that—tried to kill me again. Lost count of just how many murder attempts because once obviously wasn't enough and finally died on me." The ghost let out a breath as though the recital had been too much work and gave them a spiteful glare, "Didn't even have the decency to come back." Its attention jerked over their shoulders, "Here's another death. Maybe the last one."

Vlad.

"He would survive," Maddie grumbled. The man, or ghost, or whatever he was, could survive like no one else. A cockroach in human form. Though for once he looked desperately as though he wanted to die. No trace of royal finery could be seen in the rags of what was once a hazmat suit that barely draped over an emaciated frame. Both Fentons winced at the state of their old friend. He staggered back and forth, stooped over so badly fingers brushed ashes, moving only because his legs didn't know how to stop.

His flesh was also torn, torn by ghost hunting weapons of the past…present…future…

"Vladdie," Jack whispered in recognition.

"He's going to die too?" Maddie asked their guide.

Maddie caught a flash of red eyes rolling in exasperation, "He's going to die too—all torn up from the horrible things he did." The ghost mocked dryly.

He didn't have the chains, but otherwise his skeletal frame, pin-cushioned with blood blossoms, ectoplasmic blades and more than a few Fenton inventions, was a nearly perfect copy of the ghost who had invaded their living room only hours ago. Clothes torn, flesh torn, bones torn, he shouldn't have been able to walk. Yet he did.

"You!"

A flash of black and red shot through the smog like a diving eagle. "Damn it! Of all the people to survive! Woman's like a cockroach." The Future Ghost snarled as Red Huntress came into view.

She too had changed. Her helmet had been shredded. Blood caked over a head-wound. Her hair was cropped short and stained gray in places as though aged through trauma. Her face—so familiar, like Maddie should have her name on the tip of her tongue—was carved in lines of fury and gaunt from hunger, though she was in no way emaciated. Emotion kept her going, a burning revenge lighting those green eyes with a ghostly light. Were she to die here and now, she would doubtlessly become an obsessed hunter-ghost. A robotic arm gripped a ghost-bazooka Jack would have been proud to heft. Propped on one shoulder, the Huntress fired. With a flinch-wrenching crack a ghost net shot out, but not one made of thread. It was made of chains.

Vlad didn't dodge. At the sound of his name, their former friend didn't respond for a few seconds but when he did it was with a stop. Perhaps, like Phantom earlier, he had expended all his strength, but Maddie saw the look in his eyes. Despairing, not the eternal despair of one whom even death can grant no release, but a sort of hopelessness mixed with resignation. Vlad, once King, stopped and knelt because he wanted to.

Chains bit into his shoulder, his chest, wrapped around his throat and torso, the ends cracking against his head and legs as he toppled over.

"I should have done this a long time ago," Huntress drew a gun. Not a ghost-hunting gun but a human one.

Vlad bowed his head. "You knew I horded power. It was inevitable," he said bitterly.

BLAM.

Vlad dropped dead. Red Huntress lowered her arm. She regarded the body. "I guess I would kill a human."

"Didn't know she cared," Their guide simpered. "Heh, she's got to be about the last human around."

Jack and Maddie took the ghost's word for it. Where fields of crops used to be there were now only grave yards, or even grave-pits in this future Christmas, as though dead bodies had become too numerous to be buried individually. They had to be thrown away like garbage. Neither Fenton had any interest in exploring this death world further.

"Take us away!"

"Fine, fine…the worst is yet to come." It snapped its fingers. Again the rush of time, this combined with the rush of space as they were flung backwards through time (though undoubtedly still in the future) until they landed back at Fentonworks lab. Christmas day. To the side the containment unit was empty, bloody and both rushed in without a second thought to read the message Phantom had literally painstakingly burnt on there.

"I forgive you." Maddie said softly. Not a plea for help, not a cry for mercy like every other ghost had given them. Not even a confession as she secretly feared. Maddie frowned. Why write that? The words made no sense. She shook her head, trying to loosen a needle of pain in her heart. What did they need to be forgiven for? For destroying a filthy, disgusting ghost?

Even in her own mind those thoughts resonated hollowly.

"He must have spent all night on them," Jack whispered, touching the anti-ghost glass. A ghost would have felt flesh-scalding pain not unlike a hot burner, but his hand phased through as not even a specter could.

"Humans have the most sensitive nerve-endings in their finger-tips of the entire animal kingdom," Maddie said. "Scraping these letters so deeply, while blindfolded, must have taken hours." She sighed, "Alright ghost. We won't dissect him. Now let us go back so we can erase that horrible future."

"No, you don't get to stop here," for a moment their guide seemed furious at them before its face went blank. "Don't you want to see your greatest wish granted?" It nudged them forward.

Even if Maddie hadn't known what she and her husband were planning to do to Phantom, the ghost's enthusiasm would have kept her back away from the ghastly scene. The monstrous ghoul stared at them intently like a vampire scenting lifeblood. The Fentons hesitated, backs turned away from their counterparts, who had Phantom strapped on the dissection table.

Like they'd always wanted.

"We can change. We have changed. We don't want this anymore," Jack pleaded.

"Look." The ghost's command was the dry rasp of death. Lips turned into a snarl, fangs jutting like an ancient predator. It would not allow them to change the future, not before seeing it. Fearfully they obeyed.

Splayed out below them was the ghost boy, Danny Phantom, writhing as much as bindings would allow, gag swallowing every scream. They had created it to be powerful enough to withstand Phantom's sonic attack. No sound escaped. Scalpels dug into him, bones broke, hands clenched into fists spasmodically. The massive blindfold blackened half of his face but the sliver of bare skin between metallic gag and blinding cloth shone with fresh tears.

The future Maddie and Jack were too enamored with working, humanoid ghost organs to pay a care to Phantom's face. The scientists turned away, Maddie with an entire limb, Jack clutching something that pulsed, ready to run them through Fenton ecto-somethings. Phantom laid there, harsh breaths echoing through the lab as though his pain was physical weight.

His open chest looked so much and so little like any dissection diagram. Human organs—no, no, no he could not be! Maddie's mind shut the doorway to that insane abyss—but ectoplasm still flowed, staining the perfect scientific diagram. Too much ectoplasm. After bleeding all night how could Phantom still have any left to give? And the carved chest, baring broken ribs jutting like claws on either side, still twitching with life…exposed in a way no human could possibly survive.

In this odd spiritual form, unable to feel or taste, Maddie still felt the sting of acid crawling up her throat to her tongue.

The Fentons tore their eyes away from the gruesome vivisection, looking at his face instead. The blindfold still covered half his features but a clack snapped their attention. A strap fell away, hitting the table, then another and the gag flopped over to one side. Phantom spat the remains out of his bloody mouth. A chipped tooth toppled to the floor. In his agony, Amity's hero had bitten straight through the metal. His voice was free, but raspy and weak as any human of the future and could only whisper soft, choking words.

"I forgive you. You're good parents. I forgive you. I love you. You're good parents."

These words were spoken as a chant, a prayer, the crazed babble of a madman. Phantom trembled—through exertion against pain or fear or both the present Fentons couldn't guess. More blood splattered the metal table as he spoke. Their future selves didn't notice. The words constricted Maddie's heart like a serpent. Danny Phantom was dying—never mind the impossibility of a ghost's death—blood staining the table, dripping to the floor, organs faltering and stilling. Alone, in agony, as they'd feared was their son's fate.

And he wasted his last breaths soothing the deaf ears of their counterparts. Maddie turned away, unable to watch anymore. Pain turned to fury like a flicking switch which desperately needed an outlet; she spun around and charged, eyes venomous, teeth bared, fingers clawing at her future self, who paid as much attention to that as to Phantom's dying words. Strikes, punches, kicks, yells were as ineffective as a ghost's. Blows and words slid through the other Maddie, face alight with a smile, eyes insect-like beneath safety goggles.

"Listen to him!" she screamed, grasping hands phasing through her future self. "He's…he's…a person…" Anger bled out, leaving a raw nerve of guilt, "worth listening to," she finished lamely.

"Insipid, sentimental garbage," the future ghost grumbled, "I'm going to be sick. Why would she listen to you? You're just a ghost to her."

"Shut. Up." Jack snarled at the Ghost of Christmas Future, hands balling into fists.

Phantom's mantra slowly died. His hands stopped twitching; his head slumped to the side, his chest stilled heaving. He stopped struggling.

Jack and Maddie rushed to the table, phasing past their future selves, skidding to a stop by the table. Two pairs of tense eyes waited for him to move again, but even his core lay still. They tried touching him, shaking his shoulder as though he were only a child who needed a parent to wake them up. Their hands phased right through.

"Phan—Danny?" Jack whispered.

"Not Danny, no ring. He…he would have changed back." Maddie spoke the only words that kept them sane. If Phantom was Danny…no, no, no, nononono they couldn't. They couldn't possibly. They would have recognized their own precious son—who was also in danger, who died in the future. This couldn't be their future! Maddie's sanity danced at the edge of a pit and that pit led to hell.

Jack bit his lip, "That's…comforting," but his shoulders didn't slump with relief.

Maddie shoved the horrific (wrong) conclusion to the back of her mind. "He looks so…still," Maddie says softly, focusing on Phantom. Watching the unmoving ghost didn't make her feel better. She turned away.

Jack swallows burning bile, "Like…like he's really…"

"Dead," Maddie finished.

"This was what you wanted." The ghost of Christmas Future pointed out. "To strap him to a dissection table and rip him apart molecule by molecule." Jack flinched. "Congratulations." It duplicated, both copies leaning nose to nose with the Fentons, speaking in the voice of a desert: "Wish granted."

"Please," Jack begged. "Let us change this. We're not who we were. We can move on and learn to listen to ghosts...this doesn't have to be our future."

"You wanted this." The ghost of Christmas Future no longer sounded dry but furious. "Hours ago you wanted to kill him, to vivisect him until he died!" Bitterly it added, "Phantom's just a filthy ghost after all."

"No ghost is just a filthy ghost," Maddie said evenly, "Especially not Phantom…and not even you." That struck the Christmas spirit to dumbness. "This…what we have been doing? Is wrong," she admitted, then met the spirit's shocked stare. "Let us make it right."

The ghost snapped out of his shock. "As if you could ever make this right," the ghost growled. "You don't change, don't forgive. Don't get to forgive after everything you've done to me." The grin came back, more psychotic than ever. "Good riddance."

Jack closed his eyes, bowing his head like a man in prayer, "We are Scrooges. We will doom the future with our hate," he glanced at Phantom and again bowed his head, "Murdered this young ghost out of hate but if we're really Scrooge we still have time to change." He'd never sounded so serious in his life.

"Beg me. After all you have done to me. To your own damn son you don't give a fuck about, to Vlad. Beg me."

Maddie didn't hesitate, "Please give us a chance to free the spirits we've captured, to use the lessons taught to us by the spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future." Again she met his eyes. "You have taught us to listen. Now let us act." Her eyes hardened, "This future will not come to pass."

We promise," Jack finished.

The ghost of Christmases Yet to Come remained unmoved. 

"I think not." The most ghastly of broken smiles wrought by the worst insanity crossed their son's distorted face. "it's inevitable."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Choosing only three ghosts to represent the Christmas Spirits was hard! Especially Christmas Future, because Dan doesn't have the traditional 'silent Grim Reaper attitude' but how could I resist a true personification of a horrible future ;)


	5. The End

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Merry Christmas everyone! Had to post the conclusion on Christmas day. It's my Christmas present to you guys for all your kind words and helpful comments and just being wonderful readers! Thank you 😊

"But this is not my judgment," the Ghost of Christmas Future said.

Maddie and Jack bolted upright. They were back! Back in their own bodies. The feel of crinkling wrapping paper and sagging cushions was their own, the pain of bashing their heads together in their haste was also their own. No sign of any ghostly guide, only their own blessedly whole and undamaged living room. Christmas decorations lit up with the early dawn light: bows twinkling merrily atop presents, ghost lights glowing brightly. Wife and husband laughed aloud with relief.

"We're back," Jack whispered.

"We're back," Maddie agreed. "I could almost kiss those spirits. They," she finished the line, "They did it all in one night."

Joy slid off Jack's face. "Phantom."

"The lab." Maddie finished his thought.

Over the years, despite their attempt to adhere to professionalism and maintain some line between home and work, the Fentonworks Lab became a second bedroom and a second office. The pair had filled it with bits of themselves. First test tubes and glassware, all lovingly hand-made; then their own inventions in preference to anything store bought. Even the scalpels and dissecting tools had been Maddie's patient blacksmith work. After those, calendars and pictures and the usual trappings of home wandered in to stay.

Now the Fentons approached their own lab with the tentative wariness of ghosts, despite their living bodies. Though completely undisturbed since they'd last been downstairs, the pair stepped with more caution than in the ruined Amity Park. The stench of ectoplasm brought forth another glimpse of the terrible future, like phantom pain. Their eyes jerked immediately to the figure slumped beside his own writing on the ecto-proof glass.

'I forgive you,' was still etched painstakingly on glass.

Phantom lay in a pool of his own blood, hair stained green and black with bits of natural white showing through. Arms and legs curled slightly toward his body as though he fell asleep in a place slightly too small for him. The gag bound him to silence, his side rose and fell with slow, shallow breaths.

Sleep should've relaxed Phantom, as human as he looked, and given him the facade of a child. Whether because of their laboratory or his capture, even at rest his muscles were slightly tensed, expecting a fight at any moment. Bruises weighed heavily beneath his eyes, furrows lined his brow with pain. Dreams offered no escape.

Danny slept like that too often these days.

One hand clutched the floor, gloves burnt off at the tips. His fingers were deceptively human looking, with blunt nails over tan skin save for the pads scorched red and peeling around flesh burnt black like a handful of macabre flowers. His eyes were clenched shut too tightly, limbs jerked against an unseen opponent and soft sounds managed to escape the gag, like screaming.

Even in his sleep, they tortured him.

Once Jack opened the container, Maddie stepped inside—disregarding all their safety procedures around ghosts—and unlocked the cuffs. Stripes of bruised, red-flecked green wrapped around Phantom's ankles where metal had once been, slashing through a gash.

Maddie threw the chains away.

Jack crowded into the container and deftly undid the gag with dexterity such enormous hands shouldn't have been capable of. He threw the metallic contraption away alongside the cuffs. The blindfold joined it moments later.

Between the two of them hauling Phantom to the nearest vivisection table was easy work. They didn't bother strapping him down, not for this test. Most of their instruments were horrifically, disgustingly, immorally invasive but they had considered, in their pragmatic way, the necessity of a machine that didn't vaporize ghosts. The ecto-scanner had been born. They powered the non-invasive machine up and guided it to slide above Phantom's prone form. Harmless ectoplasmic light studied him.

The various densities and composition of Phantom's ectoplasm the machine revealed perfectly mirrored the human body. Yet that was the most heartening news the scanner portrayed. His muscle system and humanoid organs were riddled with lacerations, lungs filled with soot; the skeletal-like structure filled with breaks. On a human those wounds would have hacked away at life and felled it hours ago.

Phantom still clung to existence.

While the machine finished scanning Maddie stopped upstairs to grab the nearest first aid kit. The damn thing was half empty; somehow one or the other of their children had been breaking into it, but still has enough gauze and bandages for Phantom.

Hopefully.

Jack brought back a needle filled with something green and glowing, but slightly more an emerald shade than ectoplasm. "The ecto-dejecto. The failed formula. It should help him."

Maddie nodded and took the needle. "Honey, we need to inject this into his core, right? For best effect?"

"I think so."

"We need to cut away the suit from the torso. Get one of the scalpels, I'll perform the injection." Poised with the needle, Jack with the scalpel, they loomed over either side of Phantom, who picked the worst time in the world to wake up.

Phantom jerked away like a fly evading a swatter. Jack quickly yanked the scalpel back before he could accidentally give the ghost another laceration. The table, taking so much weight on one end, lurched up and Maddie snatched it before it could topple over onto the wounded young man. "Easy, easy."

Too late. Phantom hit the floor in a tangle of limbs, biting back a shriek of pain, body trembling all over as fires of agony bloomed. The time he'd spent asleep hadn't done anything to help, not when the lab door looked a light-year away by crawl. The ghostly hero opened his mouth to speak.

And was overcome immediately by a fit of coughing. The ragged barks of someone retching a disease from their throat turned to a violent torrent of nauseating hacks that nearly brought his lungs up. Black bile splattered on the floor. Maddie snatched the nearest cloth, one of her lab-coats, and handed the sleeve as a handkerchief. Phantom hung his head over it, white hair drooping limply around his face.

By the time Phantom's ragged, full-body hacks died to harsh panting and light coughs the white lab-coat sleeve was stained black. "Sorry," he croaked.

"Don't speak," Jack said gently and approached once more with the needle and scalpel. Phantom jerked back.

"Please," Maddie whispered. "I know you have no reason to trust us but please, we're trying to help you."

"We promise," Jack added. "On the Spirits of Christmas, we promise." He knew nothing could repay what they'd done to Phantom. They'd fought him, caged him while wounded and bleeding out, bound and gagged him like an animal…no, worse than an animal. He couldn't invent a bandage to fix that.

But they could—would do better going forward.

Phantom finally gave them the slightest of nods, hesitantly pulling himself back to the table. He still needed help getting on and as gentle as Jack tried to be, the hero still let out a hiss as broken bones were jostled. He lay perfectly still as Jack cut away part of his suit. "This is ecto-dejecto Maddie has."

Phantom relaxed, staring at them in surprise. "You know what it is?" Maddie asked.

He nodded. "It's," he coughed, "Good idea. Know about…inventions."

"Hold still then, I'm going to inject this right into your core. This will make you feel better." Watching the needle pierce the ghost hero's chest felt uncomfortably similar to vivisection but the pain couldn't have been too bad. No bitten-back screams and only a tiny wince was Phantom's reaction and the substance did well. The once dim glow flared brightly, pale skin darkened as though a bled-out corpse had been returned to life. Wounds closed and bones knitted together. He still looked bad off, but more like ten miles of bad road through hell than a hundred.

But Phantom was far from being out of the woods yet. His wounds were diminished, but the worst hadn't caked over in scabs. The flesh needed to be stitched together. Carefully Jack took out a needle and thread.

"You need to use the ecto-line…something I can't phase through…otherwise…" Phantom broke off but there was no need to elaborate.

"Oh."

That terrible knowledge came from experience. He needed to stitch himself up because someone shot at him. Because they shot at him.

Noting their darkening expressions, the ghost hero spoke again. "Hey, it's okay. You guys were pretty lousy at hurting me." Phantom gave them a lop-sided smile made all the more horrible by the suppressed wince when Jack thrust needle and ecto-resistant thread through damaged flesh. A special brand of awful slid through their hearts at the attempted comfort, but Jack continued his stitching and Maddie continued her binding.

Jack was the first to break away, last stitch knotted. He rushed to the nearest sink and scrubbed like mad at the green blood until he tore through his own gloves with the brush. Maddie lingered, looking anywhere but at Phantom as she fiddled with the Fenton Weasel, releasing a good half a dozen ghosts. Most darted toward their portal like startled fish but one turned and spat in her face in passing.

"Hey, why are you helping…?" He rasped, waving a hand at the ghosts and himself.

"It's what we should have done a long time ago," Maddie said guiltily, wiping off the ectoplasm. "We should have realized…" She freed another ghost, this one of a dog. The puppy bolted not for the portal but for Phantom, tail lifted from between his legs just long enough for a friendly wag before disappearing.

Jack, face still clammy, finished freeing the last of the ghosts. "Sorry ma'am." What else could he say?

The elder woman glared at them before her features softened, "In the spirit of the season I'll forgive…but no cookies for you!"

Once the Lunch Lady was gone Jack took down one of the distilled water bottles. "Here," Jack held it out and Maddie unscrewed the odd lid before handing it to Phantom. Hesitantly he drank, the water refreshing him. Lowering the bottle, he scrutinizing the two of them with some unreadable emotion in his eyes.

"We won't hurt any more ghosts," Jack said. He glanced down at his hands and ran to the sink again.

"You can go now if you want. We won't keep you here anymore," Maddie added.

He surprised her a second time by not leaving the lab like every other ghost. He didn't even make rude gestures. "Not that I don't mind the help because it's a really nice Christmas gift but…are you guys okay?"

"No," Maddie gave the honest truth.

To Maddie's shock Phantom limped awkwardly to Jack's side, prying his hands off the brush and guiding them to the water. Blood, ripped from her husband's flesh from hundreds of bristles on the scrub-brush, flowed away until the tiny scratches stopped bleeding. They didn't have any gauze left, but Phantom took a hand-cloth and patted Jack's hands dry, wrapping them in pristine white again. Through the whole thing her husband stood like a doll.

The stench of ectoplasm, ghostly blood, hit her. Maddie lost the battle with her own stomach and couldn't reach the trashcan in time. How long she spent with her forehead on the floor beside her own vomit, trapped between the horrific past—ecto-converter, know it's working when the ghosts screams—and future horrors Maddie didn't know. She was dimly aware of Phantom and Jack leaving, then of a cool, ghostly hand on her forehead replacing the floor as another arm nudged her up the stairs.

It was difficult to remain in a horrified daze on a warm couch surrounded by holiday decorations so the Fenton couple snapped out of it. Phantom turned to leave, wounded and tired as he always seemed to—no, always was—and they couldn't let him leave without anything. Without something.

"Thank you." Maddie actually hugged the ghost, Phantom, who stared at her so desperate and disbelieving of simple, human kindness. Did he have anyone to spend the holidays with? Did he have family at all?

Jack's hug was just as gentle and Phantom looked between them both like they lost their minds. "Um…what?"

"We're so sorry," Maddie whispers, running her fingers through his hair, sticky and matted with blood and ash and who knew what else, trying to make it clean and neat again. There was still some swelling on his scalp from too many blows. "For everything, for every wound and every hurt and every shot. We were wrong."

"Um…yeah…you guys sure you aren't possessed?"

"No," Jack said with a weak chuckle. "We've just been Scrooged."

Phantom gaped between the two, "You two were this year's Scrooges?"

That statement whetted their curiosity. Maddie really wanted ask him what he meant but now was not the time. Later maybe, after they'd built a bond of trust—if they could. Instead the couple hugged him closer, probably weirding the poor ghost out of his mind. "Did you…figure anything out?" Phantom asked cautiously, stiff as ice in their arms.

"That we were wrong," Jack said, "And I guess we were Scrooges after all."

"I don't see how you can forgive us for everything…but we will do better in the future," Maddie promised.

Jack suddenly perked up with the familiar smile of someone who has a great idea in their head, "Wait one moment."

He came back bearing a festive cookie tin, one of many they often saved just for gifts like this. "My Mads makes the best cookies and fudge and…here." Jack had stuffed the tin with cookies and to Maddie's surprise all the remaining Christmas fudge. "Merry Christmas."

"Thanks," Phantom said hesitantly, taking the gift. For a moment Maddie worried: could ghosts even eat? Was he insulted? Then he gave them a smile sincere with gratitude, which only burned the guilt within them a little more. But it was a good kind of pain, the pain of a scab peeled away to reveal new, fresh, raw skin.

She almost didn't ask, after all he's done for them, for the whole town, after all they've done against him. But her question is not for herself and she couldn't keep silent. "Do you know where our son is? Those ghosts, the three spirits and…and Vlad all said he was in danger."

He eyed them warily but admitted, "Yes."

Both Maddie and Jack stiffened in renewed fear, staring at the ghost before Jack said, "And…is he in any danger?"

An ancient smile distorted that youthful face. "I don't think he is anymore."

"And…could you get him for us? Or at least just let us know where he is," Jack asked. "You're free to go anyway but…he's just a kid. He doesn't deserve to pay for our sins."

Phantom seemed to hesitate glancing from his boots to them, to the lab. The sun rose slowly higher. Upstairs Jazz stirred at last, having slept in later than normal. Maddie wondered what kept her up last night. The ghost hero mulled for what seemed an eternity.

Finally he let out a heavy breath, shoulders slumped, head down. "Yeah…I think I can." Again he met their eyes, his back straightened, shoulders squared as life-changing determination settled over his features.

White rings appeared around his waist and suddenly Jack knew what was going to happen. Knew the impossible conclusion he'd been avoiding for so long was right. Unconscious knowledge became conscious as Phantom transformed. The impossible became possible, though the how still boggled Jack's mind.

Danny. Phantom.

When the light flowed over Phantom's body, their son was revealed. Maddie and Jack finally found the last piece of the puzzle the spirits had been coaxing them to solve all this time. Their son had been right before them all along. Unseen.

"Danny," they cried out in broken voices.

"Hey," he croaked. "It's okay. The ghosts did it all in one night."

Jazz chose that moment to walk downstairs, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. "What happened?"

"I'm fine, it's okay," Danny says again.

"Um?" Both Jack and Maddie looked between their children and Jazz looked between her parents and her brother.

Danny spoke up, "I told them. They know I'm half-ghost."

"Oh? Oh! Congratulations! This is a wonderful step in your self-acceptance and psycho—"

"Yeah, yeah, come on Jazz its Christmas, save the psycho-babble for tomorrow," Danny rolled his eyes.

"She knew?"

"He didn't tell me," Jazz admitted. "I found out on my own."

Silence haunted them: a past they could never change, a present barely realized in time, a future looming like a guillotine. As much as Maddie wanted to gather him in her arms, the raw nerve of guilt tied her arms. Her husband had no such reservations, wrapping his arms around his missing son.

Danny flinched.

Jack let go.

"Oh Danny..."

"Sorry, sorry, it's just gonna take a while."

To get used to your ghost-hunting family not trying to murder you, Maddie thought. "You don't have to apologize," she said. "I thought you would be angrier at us." More softly she admitted, "Your future self was."

Danny turned ten shades of paler. "What!" Every muscle went rigid and his baby blue eyes flashed ectoplasmic green. "What happened?"

"Maybe this should wait," Jack protested. "It's Christmas."

"Putting it off will only make it worse," Jazz pointed out. "Do you really want this kind of ghost haunting you?" No one said anything. "I'll get us something to drink."

By the time all was said the presents remained untouched, the sun was high in the sky and the hot chocolate Jazz made had turned cold. With their story finished, Maddie asked: "Honey are you angry with us? You have every right to be."

Danny glanced at his mug, which he had frozen solid with his nerves, and put it aside. "I wanted to be…sometimes…a lot of the time," he admitted, "But that dark future self, he's all the worst parts of myself and more. I'm not going to be that. I promised." He smiled wearily at them. "And I've learned my own Christmas lesson about holding onto anger," Danny said.

"Scrooged?" Jack asked curiously. He couldn't imagine his incredible heroic son needing the sort of lesson they did.

"More of a Grinch," Danny corrected, "But the thing about Grinches and Scrooges—none of them are too far gone."

This time he hugged them.

Nobody flinched.

"But you owe me big time for locking me up like that. Like no more groundings or punishments ever big."

"Why didn't you tell us?" Maddie asked, still serious. "We could have killed you."

"You wouldn't have," Danny reassured, but the words rang hollow next to the future revelation. His shoulders slumped, "A lot of reasons but…one of the big ones was…I didn't want you to feel guilty."

"That's our fault," Jack said, a hand on his son's shoulder. Danny had grown, his shoulder no longer engulfed by his father's large hands. "Besides I wouldn't want to be the kind of father who didn't feel guilt." He paused, "Do you hate us?"

"Never," Danny said. Rubbing his neck awkwardly he asked, "Do you hate me? For keeping this a secret?"

"Of course not sweetie," Maddie said.

"Now this is the best Christmas present," Jazz declared.

Clockwork turned away from the Clock-tower screen as Jazz suggested watching 'A Christmas Carol'. The scene warped to a future, a brief snippet of a green shield rebounding a pink ecto-blast. Better than a broken shield by far.

"You should have let me abandon the Fentons there," Dan Phantom grumbled. "They deserved that future. Not this," he made a nauseated face. 

"Violence dying is hardly boring," Frostbite remarked. "I for one am pleased at this outcome, a far better one than even rescuing the Great One—"

"—I wanted Fentonworks lab Crater. You would have done good work—"

"—thank you Clockwork."

"You are quite welcome and thank you for your help," Clockwork's smile turned slightly naughty at the Ultimate Enemy's disgust.

"Fine, Christmas glurge is saved. Can I please stick my head back in the Fenton Thermos now," Dan grumbled, glaring at the decorations festooning the gears as if they had personally offended him.

"Do you? This is the Christmas truce. You must honor it but so must we. A little more freedom might do you good," Frostbite commented, motioning to the party in the next room. This year the time ghost had opened his doors as host.

"Keep your redemption shit between yourselves," Dan said, turning away. "That eggnog better be spiked." He left. Frostbite followed.

Clockwork waved his staff and the sounds of the Fentons loudly denouncing Jazz's choice silenced. The screens, covered in garland from an overenthusiastic ghost obsessed with decorating, slept. There would be troubles but the future was secure now. Turning away, the Master of Time joined the celebration of Christmas. One of the best in a long time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry this took so long to post, I got three of my favorite books for Christmas and they sucked me in. Anyway, much as Dan wanted to keep the Fentons trapped, that wasn't going to happen in this story. Not with Clockwork around anyway. Or during the Christmas truce! Hope everyone enjoyed and once again Merry Christmas!


End file.
